


The Shame of the Strofzins

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Series: Daughters of Ruritania [2]
Category: Zenda Novels - Anthony Hope
Genre: Adultery, Assassination, Blackmail, Capital Punishment, Communism, Cousins, Escape, Espionage, F/F, Family Secrets, Femslash, Folklore, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied war crimes, Implied/Referenced Torture, Internalised Homophobia, Language of Flowers, Libraries, Marriage of Convenience, Mental Institutions, Murder, Next Generation, Original Characters - Freeform, Original Female Characters - Freeform, PTSD, Police surveillance, Post-Canon, Rescue, Slavish adherence to the Tables of Kindred and Affinity, Sordid Plots, Story within a Story, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wrongful detention, ruritania, shameless trolling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-18 01:04:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 32,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3550325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years have passed since the events of The Blood of the Hentzaus. Maria Hentzau is dead. Georg is on the throne of Ruritania. And Elisabeth von Tarlenheim is bored.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Quiet Evening in Strelsau

**Author's Note:**

> For standalone Princess Osra story, skip to the latter part of chapter 3.

Maria Hentzau was dead. Georg reigned in Strelsau. Theresa von Strofzin loved me. So much I knew.

Two years had passed since the incidents I have recounted previously, and Ruritania knew peace still. There had been little trouble from Augustus, Grand Duke of Mittenheim, since his embarrassment at Castle Zenda: the Ruritanian public had heard no mention either of his invading force or of the activities of the regiment that Uncle Sapt roused from slumber in the Strelsau barracks to turn the Mittenheimers back at the frontier. Uncle Sapt had, very properly, destroyed my note; my part in the other events of that night were suppressed with similar efficiency. The injury to my arm was generally taken to have been caused by a fall from a horse. The rest of it was too ludicrous even to be mentioned. The Grand Duke, locked in his own bedroom? Ridiculous! The caretaker, the only witness who might think it worth his while to remember what happened at Zenda, was of course sacked. (I believe that he was instantly re-employed on a far handsomer salary on the Königswald estate, on the other side of the country). The affair was not mentioned again.

And Maria Hentzau was dead, shot or drowned or both. I still wept for the loss of her, though I blushed for my tears. Maria Adler, Markus Hentzau, my devil and my downfall! On the day of King Georg's coronation I saw her fall from Strelsau Bridge, a bullet in her back. And I had loved her, secretly and shamefully. She had deceived me; she had – worse – betrayed Ruritania; and still I wept to see her die; still I wondered if, after all, she yet lived.

For, you see, they had never found her body.

My sorrowing heart was comforted by my dear cousin Theresa von Strofzin. Once, younger and more foolish, I had thought her a dull sneak. Now that I knew of her courage and her enterprise she filled my thoughts, shining before me and illuming my path as a heavenly beacon. And she loved me! She knew all that I had done, all that I had been, all that Maria Hentzau had made me, and she loved me! She had told me so, more with looks and caresses than with words. How could I do other than strive to deserve her love?

Safe again in peaceful Strelsau, my broken arm healed swiftly; my heart, more slowly. The injury to my pride, however, festered.

  
Following the death of Queen Flavia, Mama retained her position as supervisor of the royal household, but, with no queen to attend upon, I withdrew from life at court. King Georg assured us that I would certainly be recalled upon the occasion of his marriage, but I thought this doubtful. A royal bride would surely bring her own entourage with her; she would have no need of Ruritanians to wait upon her. I did my best to resign myself to a life of idle gossip by day, and, by night, dances with young men I would never marry. It would depend, I supposed, on the identity of the new queen. Although no name had as yet been mentioned, all Ruritania hoped for news of a swift royal marriage. There was no appetite for another succession crisis.

Georg Elphberg-Lauengram had made a timid regent in those last days when Queen Flavia had been too sick to rule. Seeking only to keep Ruritania on a straight course and to prevent Mittenheim invading (peacefully or otherwise) he had been cautious but effective. Now, as king, he became bolder. At first, we were glad. Ruritania, said Ruritania, had lost her way as Queen Flavia released her hold on government and on life itself; Ruritania was stagnating as this new and frightening century spread out before her. The King ought to do something.

The King doubled the forces on the Mittenheim border. My brother Leopold – quoting, I have no doubt, Uncle Sapt, his godfather and sometime commandant – deemed this a shocking error of judgement. Mittenheim posed scant military threat now that the king was safely crowned; there were larger, more sinister powers abroad in Europe. The tactic, however, pleased a populace that felt a woman's hand had been too gentle on the reins of power, and had not the same assurance of the Grand Duke's declawing as we had who were at Zenda that night.

Guarding the border kept the army occupied, at least. My older brother Heinrich twice did a turn of duty on the border, and pronounced it tolerable but dull. Leopold, still in the Palace Guard, remained in Strelsau and dined with us at home more often than in the mess. Karl had chosen to eschew a military career for the time being ('unless, of course,' he said, 'things become really desperate,') choosing rather to concentrate upon scholastic pursuits. I would not have been surprised to see him a man of the cloth within a very few years.

And as for me? Relieved of all my palace duties, official and otherwise, I did my best to keep house for Mama and such of my brothers as were at home, when Fischer would let me interfere in its mysterious workings. When that failed as a source of occupation, I was thrown back into the tedious round of coffee and claptrap with the other young ladies of Strelsau. It was a poor substitute. I fancied that my peers treated me with a contemptuous pity now that I was banished from the royal sphere. I was nervous, too, lest someone guess that Theresa and I were more than cousins to each other now.

In truth, we were as safe as we might be. Theresa had turned her attention to good works, and was rarely seen at the tea table these days. Popular gossip held that she was destined for the religious life. With five Strofzin girls, and only one of them as yet engaged to be married, it seemed plausible enough. I alone knew better – or I prayed that I did. I had no desire to see my beloved retreat to a convent.

  
However virtuous I and the rest of the world knew her to be, it was undeniable that Theresa's understanding of the profane sphere of society remained as keen as ever. If a scandal was imminent, Theresa knew of it; if this lady was not speaking to that one, Theresa knew why; if an appointment was to be made, Theresa could tell you who was to be promoted. She was deft at untwisting the tangled cords of rumour and constructing from them the smooth fabric of the truth. Only once had I known her to be wrong, and that a long time since. Most of Strelsau would have told you that her sister Hildegarde was the sharpest of the Strofzins, but that was because Hildegarde knew much and told it all, while Theresa knew more and told little.

Let me present one incident as an example. One evening when Heinrich and Leopold were both home on leave, and Karl from school, Mama gave a small dinner, inviting Uncle Sapt, Uncle Christian and Aunt Magdalena, their three eldest daughters, and Cousin Anton. I expected it to be dull. Everything was dull, these days. The conversation revolved around the tired old subject of the king's marriage, and whether one could believe what Gabriel Helsing had heard from the Italian ambassador about the governor of Glottenberg. I had on my right hand Uncle Sapt, who talked almost exclusively to Mama, and, on my left, my brother Heinrich, who seemed to be in a dream. I blessed them both for the opportunity they gave me to watch Theresa unobserved. It was a tolerable evening after all.

Theresa, taking my arm as we left the dining room, murmured to me, 'So when does Heinz intend to propose to Sophy?'

I stopped dead in the hallway. 'Sophy?' I squeaked, making Mama turn around to see what was the matter with me.

'You ought to have a drink of water,' Theresa said, with a concern that made me laugh. 'Or a sudden shock.' Then, more softly, as Mama disappeared into the drawing room, 'Sophy Helsing.'

'I couldn't think of any other,' I said. 'But why do you think that?'

She smiled with satisfaction. 'You clearly paid no attention to your brother.'

'Why should I,' I breathed, 'when I was paying attention to you?'

Her blush was enchanting, a pink flush seeping across her cheeks until her face was one glowing morning sky. I drew her close, wondered if I dared kiss her. Then -

'Girls!' Mama called, 'where on earth have you got to?'

Theresa extricated herself from my embrace and clapped her hands with a sharp crack that would certainly have cured my hiccups, had I had them in the first place. 'When the gentlemen join us,' she murmured, as we went in, 'follow me, and you'll see.'

Eva and Hildegarde were talking mild scandal in the corner. Aunt Magdalena, listening carefully to every word that passed between the two of them, discussed with Mama whether this new fashion in waists could possibly be _healthy_. I noted that, healthy or not, all three of the girls were sporting it.

As I sat down I caught Theresa's eye, to see her scheme. She let one eyelid flicker a little, and began to talk with great enthusiasm about good Father Peter and his work in the parish. She kept this up for some minutes, punctuated only occasionally by my bored, 'Oh, really?' or 'How interesting!', until we heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor.

'… And Frau Müller is really doing so much better now, you wouldn't believe it,' Theresa said. 'She's already talking of finishing that altar frontal. Which reminds me – I ran into Julia Czechenyi last week.'

The gentlemen knocked, tramped in, and settled, looking distinctly incongruous in this feminine sanctuary. Karl sat next to Aunt Magdalena, and, it was quite evident, immediately wished he had done otherwise, for she began to quiz him minutely regarding his studies. Uncle Christian joined them. Heinz perched on a tiny chair between Eva and Hildegarde. Uncle Sapt kissed Mama's hand again; Cousin Anton, clearly not wishing to be outdone, did the same, and I smiled graciously at them all, and answered Theresa as if they were not there. 'Julia? Dear Julia! How was she?'

'Oh – mysterious as ever! She wouldn't tell me anything about anything – which rather makes me think there was nothing of importance to know. Oh, but she urged me to write to poor Malgorzata.'

'Poor Malgorzata!' I echoed, although I had seen Malgorzata but a few days since, and so far as I could see there was nothing wrong with her at all.

Hildegarde looked up. 'Do you ever hear of Maria Adler these days, Elsa? You and she were great chums at one point.'

I jumped in my chair. So, I think, did Mama.

'Maria Adler?' Theresa might have been talking about the dustman, for all it seemed to move her. 'She went back to America.'

'No, but she came back,' Hildegarde reminded her. 'It was quite a sensation.'

'And then she went back again. She was always flighty.'

'I thought it was Paris,' I said, and marvelled how calm I could sound.

'Well, Hilda, that would seem to answer your question,' Theresa commented. 'None of us has heard of her at all. Now -' she nodded at me, 'Sophy Helsing I have seen recently. She looked well.'

I was watching Heinrich, and I saw him colour, and move forward eagerly in the little tapestry-seated chair. Of course Theresa was right. She always was.

'Perhaps Sophy's in love,' I said, wickedly. 'Did you see her to speak to?'

'Oh, indeed,' Theresa said. 'She said that Katharina – her cousin, you know? - is to go to England this summer...' and continued to speak of Katharina with no apparent comprehension of the fact that none but her knew the lady – or cared where she went. (I am sure I saw Heinz mutter, 'Katharina can go to the devil!')

It was proof enough. As I kissed Theresa good-night – not the sort of kiss I would have given her, had I had better opportunity – I admitted as much. 'You know my own brother better than I do!' I told her.

'Call tomorrow, after eleven,' she whispered, while her sisters fussed with their cloaks. 'We are going to buy more of Eva's trousseau, but you'll find that I shan't be well enough.'

When we went back in, Heinz cornered me. He desired to know everything I could remember about Sophia Helsing. I told him in gleeful detail about our raid on the school kitchens, what delicacies we found, and how sick she was afterwards. I think he and I both got what we deserved. Heinz did not care, it was plain. It was enough for him to hear the beloved name. No more did I. I did not care a rush for Sophy, but I would see Theresa tomorrow – alone.

  
It took me no little effort to suppress my impatience the next morning. It would be fatal to arrive too early and be myself taken off to choose Eva's laces and ribbons. I waited until eleven, then allowed Aunt Magdalena and the girls another half hour to leave the house; then I paid my call on the Strofzins. Mama being at the palace and my brothers at the barracks or at their studies, there was none to remark upon my absence. Besides, what was there remarkable in my visiting my own relations?

I was of course mightily disappointed when it transpired that none of the Strofzins were at home save the Countess Theresa, who was indisposed.

'Would you find out if the Countess Theresa is well enough to see me?' I asked.

The Countess Theresa was. She lay on a chaise-longue in the darkened morning-room, a shawl drawn over the lower portion of her form, a book face-down on her lap. A wan smile struggled across her countenance as I was shown in; then, as the door closed, she made a most remarkable recovery, sitting up with surprising swiftness and sending the book tumbling to the floor. I picked it up, and saw it was a life of Saint Boniface. I wondered if she still read Marx. Though we had exchanged many sweet secrets since she bound me to silence regarding her friends in the Altstadt, some natural reticence yet clung to that subject, and I had never asked her.

I had hardly time to wonder now. Theresa twitched the curtains yet more closely together and, as I sat down on the edge of the couch, drew me into her arms and turned her face up in expectation of the kisses that I did not delay to bestow upon her. There being scant room for me while she occupied the whole length of the seat, she turned so that she lay on her side, pulling me with her so that we were face to face, and I (at least) close to paradise.

When I had been the lover of Maria Adler my conduct was scandalous – or would have been, had any known of it. Now my heart belonged only, always, to Theresa von Strofzin – and yet when I embraced her I could not help but remember Maria's quick, fierce, assaults and my own delicious surrenders. To my shame, I longed to serve Theresa the same way: to kiss her throat hard enough to bruise, to part her neat garments and feel her soft skin against mine, to hear her cry out in the same iniquitous ecstasy that I had known.

I strove to hide my base desires from her. Ungrateful wretch that I was, when she had poured the riches of her soul before me, to yearn for the flesh! Even now, I blush to tell how I desired her. She, innocent, returned my kisses with a sweet eagerness that inflamed my passion all the while it bound me tighter to her love.

And with such I did my best to be content.


	2. Ruritania Awakes

We in Ruritania had mourned long for our beloved Queen Flavia and even now, with nigh on three years passed since her death, the national mood remained sombre. A state visit from a minor Scandinavian princess was an excuse to lighten it. The king announced a grand ball. Strelsau cast off its last black veils and stormed the palace.

I did not go. I had contracted a streaming cold, and, much as I would have liked to peep at this possible new queen and mistress, I agreed with Mama that I would present a sorry figure with my nose buried in a handkerchief and that, should I wish the princess to have me as her lady-in-waiting, I would do well not to pass my illness on to her.

Mama would have stayed to care for me, but nothing in the palace could be assured to run without her. My brothers accompanied her. Theresa, good Christian and lover, came to dine with me and, though I fear I was poor company, my evening was not so dull as one might have feared.

After she left, I sat up late, reading and waiting for Mama. She came in at last at half past two, with great dark shadows beneath her eyes and a rip in the skirt of her dress. Glittering Strelsau was, it seemed, itself again.

'Elsa, you bad girl; you should have gone to bed!' But she was glad I had not, I could see.

I had dismissed the staff hours ago; I made the coffee myself. 'A palace ball in the old grand manner, then?' I asked as I poured.

'Grand, but not old,' she said. 'I should have had to get a new dress anyway; even intact, this one is quite passé. And perhaps it's time I came out of mourning.'

I nodded. To my mind she looked well in black, it befitted her office, unacknowledged as that was, and her dignity. Still, it had been three full years now since my father was murdered.

She leaned forward, lowering her voice though there was none to hear us. 'The Duchess of Elbe – the Dowager, I should say – is in half-mourning.'

'She was there?' This was news indeed! It must be the first time since the coronation that the Dowager Duchess had been seen in public. On that occasion she had been all in black. 'How does purple become her?'

'Oh, she looked well enough, and she seemed to relish the loosened trammels,' Mama said. 'And the King was very courteous to his uncle's widow. He had the princess seated at his right hand at dinner, but he had the Dowager Duchess on his left, and enquired all the while to see that she was comfortable, that the food pleased her...' She frowned.

'It's high time the King married,' I said. I was not concerned merely with my own occupation.

'Forgive me, my child, if I say that observation is hardly original.' Her mischievous smile robbed the remark of its sting. And suddenly she was serious again. 'Not a word of this – though I fear it's already too late.'

  
She was right. As was only to be expected, the princess left Ruritania without any marriage having been arranged.

'Did she tell the King why?' I asked.

Mama laughed. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I do know, however, that the Dowager was furious. She has returned to Ritterbad.'

Until, I supposed, the King had learnt discretion. It was too much to hope that the rest of those who had been present knew it already. Strelsau might not care that the King had a mistress – or even that she was, legally speaking, his aunt – but the insult to an attractive and eligible princess was regrettable. Patriotism only went so far, and criticism was muttered in the highest circles.

Theresa was horrified when I told her. 'His _aunt_?' she exclaimed.

'She's no blood relation, she's only the widow of his uncle, and is at most three years older than he,' I observed.

'It's the same thing.'

I did not see that it was, but I deferred to her superior knowledge.

Still, the world said in mitigation, he was at least paying due attention to the Mittenheim question. Which was true. The Dowager Duchess of Elbe owned an estate in Mittenheim.

  
I cursed my luck for having been ill enough to miss the only excitement in months. I recovered swiftly out of sheer irritation, and two weeks later was judged well enough to attend the Strofzins' dinner party. This was poor compensation; the chatter was all about the ball I had been unable to attend, and I could not even see Theresa from where I was seated.

Instead, Aunt Magdalena had placed me next to a Dr Wolff, a tall, thin man with pince-nez and a blond beard, who was her latest find. He was extremely talkative. I learned that his practice was well-respected and expanding by the day; that he supposed that he might be described as a fashionable consultant, if I cared to put it that way; that he specialised in disorders of the mind, particularly – he said this with a knowing leer that had me moving his chair as far from him as was compatible with conventional politeness – those common in young... that is, young ladies of my age, whom the delights and duties of marriage had not yet matured into the fullest flower of womanhood. That he owned an establishment – a hospital, one might say – in the Hauptwald, where his patient could enjoy complete rest and privacy while they took their treatments.

I remarked that my school had been in the Hauptwald. 'The convent of St Milburga – do you know it?'

He did. He intimated that – not caring to betray names – a number of his patients had been drawn from there.

'I fear,' he said, 'that the ladies whose conditions I have been describing are _quite_ unsuited to the religious life – and that they are often the very ones who place themselves in such surroundings, where their symptoms are bound to become much worse. It's a great tragedy.' Though I must remark that he did not seem at all saddened by the idea.

'How does one treat such a disorder, Dr Wolff?' I asked. 'It sounds as though one can hardly take a tonic to heal the mind!'

'There are ways and means, my dear,' he said, 'ways and means. The careful control of the diet is essential, of course. And as a matter of fact I do prescribe certain medicines. Routine, now...' He expanded upon the timetable at his establishment; it sounded to me as if he attempted to cure by means of sheer boredom. '… That occupies the morning. Luncheon – plain, boiled potatoes with a little white meat – one o'clock until two. A walk – supervised, of course – in the grounds, until half past two. After that, the afternoon rest, followed by Treatment.'

'Treatment?'

'Physical treatment – designed to dissolve the preoccupation of the patient, allowing them to move through the mental and emotional spheres. Sadly, it is not always pleasant,' he said.

'For the patient?' I asked, though I was not sure that I cared to know.

'For the patient, indeed, no, but I meant for the physician. It's most upsetting to watch. But there! one must remember that one's doing it for the good of these poor women. Indeed, it has been very successful in a number of cases. One must persevere.'

I supposed that one must.

  
The evening was somewhat redeemed when, at the very end, Heinz was found to be missing, and Sophia Helsing missing with him. Mama did not seem to be worried in the least, and Sophy's parents were similarly unconcerned; from which I gathered that this was an expected and happy event.

And, indeed, within a very few minutes Heinz appeared with Sophy on his arm, and Sophy with a ring on her finger. The Helsings glowed with pride. I too was pleased. I could think of plenty of girls I would have liked less for a sister-in-law; although of course Theresa, having been proved right once again, was sure to be insufferable.

  
But Theresa had already abandoned that subject. The next time I saw her – walking in the public gardens with Klara and Ninetta – she had other things to tell me.

'Here's news for you! The King has reinstated the police reports!'

'Well!' I exclaimed. But I found that I was not surprised. When I was a very little girl, much was made of Queen Flavia's order to cease routine surveillance of certain personages who had been deemed suspicious at some point or another. If, she had said, a queen could not trust her own people, and could not be seen to trust them, she was a poor monarch. I understand that the surveillance had continued much as before, but was limited to those who were considered to pose an immediate threat and undertaken much more subtly, with the aim of gathering useful information rather than intimidating Ruritanian citizens into sullen obedience. With all Ruritanian eyes on the Mittenheim threat, the King's decision to reverse this order was hardly unexpected.

'I consider it very sensible,' Ninetta said. 'It's high time the King paid attention to what's going on at home.'

I was about to agree, thinking any attention to matters outside Ninetta's own flighty little head an improvement, but I caught Theresa's reproachful eyes upon her, and swallowed my words. Sometimes I wondered whether, had the old, thorough, police reports continued, my father would have lived – whether the man who had shot him would have been discovered and apprehended – but speculation was of no use. Any other family could claim that it was plain to see that Ruritania had managed very well these past twenty years without police reports.

'Whom is the King having watched?' I asked. 'I suppose he's interested in the Mittenheimers.'

'I don't know,' Theresa said, her boredom feigned so cleverly that only I saw through it.

'But you guess?'

She only shook her head. All the same, I was beginning to recognise her evasions. I knew that she had someone in mind. Her former acquaintances in the Altstadt, perhaps? Or were they too small beer to trouble the King? I could hardly ask with her sisters here.

Klara said, 'Of course it's the Mittenheimers. They must have their spies here.' She peered around the park as if expecting to see one behind every linden tree. 'But Elsa – tell us, are you to be bridesmaid for Heinz and Sophy? Eva has us in lemon yellow – can you imagine?'

The conversation turned to matters of less import, and I would almost have said that Theresa was as eager as either of the younger ones to abandon the question that she herself had raised.

  
I asked Uncle Sapt, the next time he called, what he made of it.

'Ruritania,' he said, 'is going to the dogs.'

'So you have often remarked before, sir,' said Leopold, who was not on duty that afternoon and was taking coffee with the pair of us.

He snorted. 'Ha! Your mother hasn't told you, then?'

'Told us what?' I asked. Mama had told us little of court affairs of late; though I did not think that this was because there was nothing to report. Indeed, she had been so seldom at home that I hardly saw her, and even Heinz's engagement took a back place. Last night she had come home so late that I had already gone to bed.

'Why, this: that yesterday our damned fool of a king appointed Red Alex as his advisor. A more dangerous pair of clowns I never saw -'

Theresa had not told me of this!

'I had heard that the Count of Winterstadt is very competent,' Leopold ventured.

'Competent! yes; that's why he's dangerous. He looks a fool; the King is one; between the pair of them Ruritania's bound for the devil. Ah!' said Uncle Sapt, as I began to protest, 'I shouldn't say such things before you youngsters, but it's no less true for that. The King is an innocent, and it's the one thing he can't afford to be. Red Alex leads him by the hand. Royal blood he may have, but royal brains he hasn't. I suppose he wasn't brought up to it. Though I've known better men -'

'You're very frank, Uncle,' I said.

'It's expected of an old man,' he returned. 'No, my dears, I'm worried.'

'What do you make of the police reports?' I asked him.

Uncle Sapt was of the old guard. He made an approving sort of noise. 'Oh, that will be Winterstadt,' he admitted, grudgingly. 'He knows that Mittenheim's a red herring, and that trouble will come from closer to home.'

'If it comes at all,' I said, more as an experiment than because I believed whole-heartedly in this reign of peace. I had no doubt at all that trouble would come, if for no other reason than that the King was going looking for it.


	3. Trouble in Glottenberg

The uprising in Glottenberg came as a shock. The King was preoccupied with Mittenheim; the papers filled their pages with sycophantic reports on the condition of that state, denouncing its population as savage and stupid, and making the Grand Duke out to be at once incompetent and infernal. Mittenheim, we understood, retaliated in its own (outrageously biased) press with pure libel.

And all the while Glottenberg had seethed and hissed, and at last it exploded. There had been matter there for an explosion ever since Rudolf IV married Araminta of Glottenberg and united the kingdoms. For their son, Stephen III, called himself king, not of Ruritania-Glottenberg, but of Ruritania alone, and the nation, tiny as it was, became a province. Glottenberg separatists had been defacing signposts and mutilating monuments here and there for decades; now, with Strelsau's attention fixed on Mittenheim, they organised themselves, and wholesale rebellion broke out in Ludwigshof. They sacked the provincial office, burned the governor's palace to the ground, and raised the old azure dragon on the flagpole over the castle.

And Glottenberg was worth keeping: one fourth of all Ruritania's copper was mined deep below it. The mountain from which it claimed its name rose sheer on three sides, making its strange flat top all but inaccessible. It was impossible to send an army there, unless one sent it ten men at a time, to be picked off by a marksman at the top of the pass. A band of desperate, determined rebels could hold on for months. Still, there was more to Glottenberg than the mountain, and the rest of the province caused plenty of trouble as the Ruritanian army closed in. The advance towards the mountain was slower than blind patriotism had claimed, but it was, it seemed, relentless, and we in Strelsau hoped every day for news of the fall of Ludwigshof. It could, we were sure, be only a matter of time, and a short time at that.

As is perhaps evident, we were over-confident in the strength of our army, and underestimated the difficulties. Our forces might have secured the surrounding farmlands and woods, but they could not finish the task. They reached the foot of the pass, and they stuck.

'Starve 'em out,' Uncle Sapt grunted.

He was long retired from active service now, but he had as good a mind for strategy as ever, and he was right in this case. The forces encamped around the foot of the mountain, and closed off the high road to Ludwigshof. If we could only go up in ones or twos, then so must the enemy, and one cannot feed a city on what a man can carry on his back.

Glottenberg was proud and Ruritania was proud, and the only question was how long their pride could stand against ours – and against the equally redoubtable powers of cold and hunger. Some neat diplomatic work convinced Germany and Bohemia that supplying Glottenberg with food or ammunition or anything would be poor policy. After that, we had more reason than ever to think that it would only be a matter of time.

Heinz's regiment, with two or three others, was withdrawn from Mittenheim and posted to Glottenberg. We besieged the rebels all through that long, cold winter. The rebels starved; the army froze. Those billeted with villagers in the little houses clustered at the foot of the climb endured the surly welcome for the sake of the stove and the blankets; those who had to make shift with tents would gladly have changed with them, even had they been guaranteed a greeting twice as frosty.

Inside the citadel, the rebels exhausted the food supplies long before their fuel ran out. More than once were desperate men – women, too, Heinz said bitterly, and children – caught outside the walls, where they had gone in search of food. Sometimes they got as far as a regiment's supplies. Once, Heinz said, it was a woman in whose cottage two officers of another regiment had been quartered. She was found to have been taking bread to the city walls, passing it to some accomplice within –

He did not finish that tale.

  
As you see, much of what I have related I learned from Heinz – or, rather, from what he told me afterwards, for of course letters, even from officers, were not permitted to deal in detail with affairs of war. He wrote to us regardless, but his letters were more concerned with the local customs and peculiarities than with military strategies or successes.

_Do you remember_ (he wrote) _the story of Princess Osra and the prince of Glottenberg, how he courted her while he loved another, a girl of far humbler birth, how our princess graciously forgave him, and how the girl died soon afterwards of a broken heart? They tell a different version of it here, and there has been some trouble on account of that. The Glottenbergers seem to take this Cecilia as some kind of patron saint, and they say Princess Osra murdered her out of jealousy! More than once I have had to break up fights between my men and the locals..._

I read this portion to Theresa, who had happened to call on me the morning it arrived. She laughed, and remarked that she thought it all too likely. 'I doubt the story that we know is the true one, either. I'm sure Princess Osra was human, just like any of us.'

I suppose Princess Osra is a sort of patron saint herself: the talisman of the happy – or at least resigned – Ruritanian lover. (The unhappy ones go, as I believe I have mentioned before, to Faithful Janetta, who is ever pleased to receive them in her watery home.) An ardent young man wishing for a favourable answer will compare his beloved to Princess Osra; equally, a stoic young man who fears that answer will be 'no' will think of all the men who loved Princess Osra hopelessly and, sometimes, fatally, and comfort himself with the thought that she is believed to have loved each of them a very little.

Indeed, my brother, having dealt summarily with the Glottenberg question, and clearly prompted by his own talk of the princess, then devoted three pages to the many virtues and graces of Sophia Helsing. I shall not reproduce these.

'Theresa,' I said, when I had finished reading the letter, 'do you think _women_ loved Princess Osra?'

She frowned slightly; she did not much care to talk of kings and queens; but she said, 'If she was all they say – then yes, undoubtedly.'

'Do you think,' I pursued, 'she found room in her heart to love _them_ , too? Even only a very little?'

Theresa took my hand and kissed the tips of my fingers. 'I heard a story once,' she said, slowly, 'about the Countess of Lichthus, who was lady-in-waiting to Princess Osra. I heard that she came to love her whom she served.'

'Tell me the story,' I begged, half in mischief, for I suspected Theresa of inventing it to please me, and I thought I might test her powers of composition.

She saw my game; she laughed at me. 'Very well, then. It was not with the countess as it was with the men, who saw the princess one moment and loved her the next. The countess was with her each day, from when she laced her dainty shoes in the morning until she blew out her candle at night, and as every day passed she thought more highly of the princess, until love crept in unheeded and she wondered why it was that her heart was bursting within her breast.

'She saw the princess laugh, she saw her rage; she saw her in her kindness and she saw her in her cruelty. Still she loved her, more and more, day by day. And she knew that this was the same love that the kings and the princes would offer, and she knew that hers alone could not be spoken of.'

I stirred.

Theresa raised her eyebrows at me. 'I didn't say it was a happy story. The Countess Lichthus was happy then, though. She served her whom she loved; to her came the smiles and the idle, unthinking, caresses for which men would have killed or died. She would not have dared to ask to be near royal Osra, but fate had placed her there, and she rejoiced in it.

'Her task it was to bedeck the princess's apartments with flowers, and it was her especial joy to find the most perfect roses, of the deepest crimson hue, and have them placed where those eyes she loved would first rest in the light of morning. The princess delighted in those peerless blooms; she would wear them in her hair and at her bosom, and often she would take one from its vase, hold it to her face, and kiss it.

'The Countess Lichthus, seeing this, asked nothing more. And so the days went by, and so was she happy – as happy, at least, as almost anyone else who loved Princess Osra.

'And then word came from the countess' homeland. Old Lichthus, her father, was desperately ill; at the point of death, they said. And she was the only child, and she had to go to him. She wept to leave the lady who was the sovereign of her heart as well as the princess of Ruritania, but duty came before all.

'When she reached her home, she found that matters were indeed ill. Her father was dying, it was true, but, worse than that, a great plague had afflicted all the city and the villages round about. When she heard the news of this, she let out one great cry. After that, she spoke not one word of discontent. The very hour she arrived, she put on a plain black gown, and set out both to nurse her father and to relieve the suffering of their servants and their tenants as best she could.

'Her father died. Her mother, too, contracted the plague, and lived but a few days longer. And in the town and in the farms there was also great desolation, and none dared to come near the place.

'I do not know how long it was before the countess woke with a soreness in her limbs, and a pounding head, and knew that she, too, was doomed to die. I have heard, though, that now she could not go out among the people, she confined herself to her room, and suffered no one to attend her, lest they too catch the disease.

'And, for so long as she could hold a pen, she wrote letter after letter to her royal lady, speaking of her love and her devotion. But she left one last command, directing that these letters be burnt, for she would not suffer them to be sent; she would not take the risk of exposing her whom she loved to the infection. She died, I heard, with that name on her lips; she imagined that Princess Osra embraced her, and she was happy.'

'And so Princess Osra never knew she loved her so,' I said.

'She never knew,' Theresa agreed.

'But if she had done, Princess Osra would have loved her.'

'Princess Osra did love her. I hope and believe it.'

'Would have loved her still more, then.' I was obstinate.

'I hope so.' There were tears in her eyes, and I wondered that the story moved her so.

I pressed her hand to my heart. 'How much of that is true?' I asked her.

She half-turned, and kissed me. 'As much,' she said softly, 'as is true of any story.'


	4. A Triumphal Return

At length came the news that had, after all, been no less than inevitable. Glottenberg – or, rather, the handful of traitors who had the audacity to call themselves 'Free Glottenberg' – surrendered; the army entered the city; the ringleaders were hanged; and Ruritania was once more at peace.

My brother came riding home into Strelsau with his regiment, and a half-starved, cocksure band they were. I was gratified to be known as the sister of that Ruritanian hero Heinrich von Tarlenheim. Mama glowed with pride. Even Theresa was impressed, though she, of course, pretended that revolutions were to her a halfpenny diversion.

Heinz, however, was morose and short-tempered. I heard from Nikolas that he was as fair (if as strict) a commander as he always had been, but he would take no praise from civilians. Strelsau society would gladly have lionised him, but he snapped and growled at any who tried it, even Mama. We learned to speak of other things, or, better, nothing at all.

So it was that, one night when he had dined with us, he and I were sitting silently before the fire. Mama had retired to bed with a headache (poor Mama! it was hard to see the lines of worry fade in her face when Heinz returned, only for them to be graven once more upon it now that he was acting so oddly) and so we two were left with our own thoughts.

Our own thoughts, aye, and mine were of no consequence. On the other hand, it was evident that Heinz was deeply troubled. He stared intently into the fire; from time to time he muttered things that might have been suppressed oaths. Once or twice he got up from his chair and paced an agitated circuit of the room before returning to it with a weary sigh.

I, knowing not what to do, remained where I sat, turning over a leaf of my book from time to time, but reading not one word of it. From beneath my eyelashes, I watched my brother, and I bit my lip with the worry.

Suddenly he burst out, 'I have seen things that have made me ashamed to call myself Ruritanian!'

I looked at him sharply, but I did not speak.

He shook his head, despairing. 'I cannot tell you, Elsa; it is too awful for you to know. Where I could, I punished, but not all of it fell within my authority – some of it far above me! Sometimes I am tempted to resign my commission. It's monstrous...' He turned his face away from me and fell once more to looking deep into the fire, as if he might find some kind of sense within the flames.

'I will not resign,' he said at last. 'The thing must be done, and the next man might not...' He could not finish that sentence; his natural modesty allied itself to his reluctance to speak or think ill of his fellow officers. But I knew what he meant, and I was desperately sorry for him.

' _Must_ the thing be done?' I ventured, after he had been silent yet longer.

'Oh, yes,' he protested. 'It had to be done in Glottenberg, at least. And even if it must not be done there, it would have to be done somewhere else, sooner or later, and it would be the same there.'

  
The celebrations in Strelsau were magnificent. There was a service of thanksgiving in the cathedral, the air opaque with incense and heavy with music; there was a parade all through the city, Altstadt and Neustadt rejoicing alike, and there was a ball at the palace.

I had been used to these glittering occasions when I waited upon Queen Flavia. In those days of peace and progress, we knew well our good fortune, and any fragment of good news served as excuse for a celebration. But times had changed: first death, then war, had dampened our spirits, and this was the first affair of any moment - excluding, of course, the one that I had done well to miss – in years. All Strelsau was there.

All of Strelsau? Not quite. Heinz, naturally, would not come (and he excused himself none too graciously); Mama being fully occupied in her professional capacity, so to speak, I was accompanied by Leopold and by my erstwhile fiancé Nikolas von Werdenstein.

My dance card was not particularly full. I was hardly a wide-eyed débutante, and the eligible young men of Strelsau, taking it for granted that I would marry either Nikolas or nobody, were inclined to leave me to my own devices. Between my dances, I lingered at the side of the room in the company that I preferred – with Theresa, and the other unmarried women, under the watchful but indulgent collective eye of the duennas.

It was in this sanctuary (to which Nikolas had briefly been admitted to provide me with a glass of champagne) that I stood, laughing at some joke that I forgot the moment I heard announced:

'The Count of Luzau-Rischenheim! The Countess of Regensberg! Miss Maria Adler.'

It was as well that Nikolas still held both glasses of champagne. Even so, my face must have betrayed to him my consternation. 'Elsa! Are you ill? You've gone quite pale.'

'I feel a little... faint,' I murmured. 'This room is so warm.'

He found me a chair. I sank into it, contriving as I did so to turn it so that I could observe two thirds of the room in the mirrored panels without it being obvious that I looked for one face alone.

I saw her at once. Though I had seen her last a cropped-haired prisoner in men's clothes, a corpse falling head-first from the parapet of the great bridge, I knew her now in crimson silk, her black hair dressed in a haughty pompadour, rubies glowing at her throat. Though I had thought her dead, she stood here now as large as life. The flashing dark eyes were the same; the lips (O, those lips that I had kissed times beyond numbering!) still bore that arrogant curving smile.

She surveyed the room with a cool glance that absorbed everything – myself more than any of it. She had seen me, I knew it; and of course she had the advantage, for she must have known that I would be here. Had she come here expressly to meet me? I fought to keep my breath steady and Nikolas, alarmed, hurried to fetch me a glass of water.

I watched Maria's progress in the mirror. All of Strelsau, it seemed, was taken by this new beauty, and the Count was crowded around with people clamouring to be introduced to his lovely companion. I blushed to imagine what they must think her – or, at least, I blushed.

Nikolas returned, with the promised glass of water – and Theresa with him, my good angel hot on the heels of my returned devil. Lovely Theresa, dressed all in serene blue, and her hair shining in the light of that bright room! O, but a frown wrinkled her forehead, and it was my fault. She was troubled to see Maria, and more troubled still to see Maria's effect upon me.

'Come, Elsa, let us go somewhere quieter,' she urged me, and Nikolas offered me his arm.

'I shall be perfectly well in a moment,' I protested, for, to my shame, I would not have risen from that chair for a king's ransom, not if it meant taking my eyes from my old adversary and lover.

Theresa looked at me with something like suspicion in her eyes. I wish to God that my thoughts had not warranted it. I made shift to compose myself, and danced a lancers with my brother and a quadrille with Nikolas in order to demonstrate my complete indifference to this new arrival. Neither of them, of course, knew anything of my previous connection with Miss Adler; Leopold had still been at school, and Nikolas entirely preoccupied with his Baroness, when she was last in society here. If pushed, they might have recalled that I was at school with her, and they could hardly have forgotten that young rake Markus Hentzau who had once set Ruritania by the ears, but they knew nothing to connect the pair beyond the association with the Count of Luzau-Rischenheim, and less still of my liaison with that same Markus Hentzau. As we whirled around the floor, each in turn exclaimed to me on the manifold charms of this fair stranger, who had as yet spoken not one word to them.

When she approached us, however, it was me whom she greeted, in the French manner, with a cool kiss on each cheek. 'Elsa von Tarlenheim!'

'Maria Adler!' I did not know what game she was playing now, but I could only follow her move. 'You remember my cousin Theresa?'

'Of course.' Maria did not trouble not to look bored. 'How are your little dogs, Countess?'

Theresa said, 'As well as one might expect. Your cat seems to have nine lives.' She might have been a cat herself, with arched back and fur standing on end.

'You are mistaken, my dear,' Maria said. 'I never had a cat.'

'Indeed? How odd.' Theresa turned her head away; had she been a cat in truth, she would have been washing her paws, pretending that nothing was happening at all. I did not speak, fearing that I might spark a conflagration and find all three of us ruined when the flames died down. My relief when the orchestra began playing was immense.

'Sweet cousin, you promised me this dance.' And Leopold led Theresa off into the throng. She could not protest; she only threw a troubled look at me over her shoulder.

Maria saw that, and laughed softly. Around her, other men clamoured for a dance.

'Why, I thank you,' she said, 'but I must decline, for I'm weary, and, besides, I would talk to my old friend Elsa.' She dismissed them all with an imperious nod, and they wandered off to pluck wallflowers.

'You have a nerve,' I said, light as I might, 'coming back into Ruritanian society after you sought to bring it down.'

'Not I. Markus Hentzau.' She said it with a bold glance, reminding me – as if she thought I could forget – what Markus Hentzau had been to me.

Uneasy desire stuck in my throat. 'I would know his face again.'

‘Markus Hentzau’s dead,’ she reminded me, ‘and no one except we two – and I suppose your Strofzin milksop – knows his other name.’

‘My mother knows,’ I told her, though I could not see myself that it contradicted her point.

‘You fool.’

I always was a fool, where Maria was concerned. I did not give her the satisfaction of knowing that. 'Well, then,' I said, changing the subject with scant grace. 'How do you come to know the Count of Luzau-Rischenheim?'

'My dear, he's family.' She alluded to her deceased father, who was a cousin of the good Count.

'Ah, but does he know that?' For Maria's father had never acknowledged her, and that same father had caused the Count a good deal of trouble in his time. It was perhaps for this reason that Markus Hentzau had never been received by him.

'He does, for I told him. He seems rather intrigued by the idea of a daughter of his disgraceful cousin Rupert. Particularly one with no legal claim.'

‘You won’t marry him?’ Jealousy stirred within me, for I could not be sure that she would not. He was not yet an old man.

‘Not if I can help it. Monogamy doesn’t suit me.’

‘I well remember,’ I said.

I don’t believe Maria was ever ashamed of herself. Now, she only laughed. 'In any case, you needn't worry. I don't appeal to his taste any more than he appeals to mine. It's a pity he never saw fit to receive Markus! He was most attached to my father, or so I've heard.'

I wondered from whom she had heard it, but did not care to encourage her by asking. I turned the question back to the present generation. 'So, if not marriage...?'

'Adoption. Not as his ward, of course – I'm of age – but as his _protégée_.' This term has a very specific meaning in Ruritanian law; it allows a person to leave certain property to one who is not related to him – or, indeed, not related in a manner that can be proven – rendering it almost impossible to challenge the will.

'He has no heir,' I conceded.

'Not yet. Trust me, Elsa: it will not be long until he has. I've become most attached to Ruritania; I intend to make myself a compatriot of yours without delay, and serve my country as a – true-born daughter.'

She spoke lightly, and God knows that I had little enough justification to believe any word that fell from her lips, but there was a certain flicker of her eyelids that almost made me think her sincere.

  
The dance ended, and in the _mêlée_ I lost Maria, or she lost me. But Leopold handed Theresa back to me, and this time I agreed that indeed, now that I came to think about it I was still feeling a little faint, and I would be very happy to accompany her out onto the balcony for some fresh air.

We had it entirely to ourselves. I took full advantage of this fortunate circumstance to assure Theresa in both word and deed of my undying devotion to her and her alone, then proceeded to business. In a swift whisper I apprised her of what Maria had told me – and of what she had not. 'There must be more to it than that, of course,' I said.

Theresa wrinkled her nose. 'I don't know. Perhaps she's a reformed character.'

'You don't believe that.'

A low laugh. 'No. Not for a moment. She still looks at you as if... But it may be only that she's after the Hentzau estates.'

'But she can't inherit the title.'

'Not without the king's favour.' Theresa was verging on pedantry here.

I thought that the king would have scant reason to look with favour upon the woman who had been Markus Hentzau, did he but know that she had been the henchman of Augustus of Mittenheim. 'That surely won't happen. And why should she care?'

'If I were her, with a name I couldn't prove, I would care.'

'I never heard of Rupert of Hentzau caring much for titles,' I retorted.

'That,' Theresa said, 'is because he was fortunate enough to have one.'


	5. A Sinister Commission

Theresa might have been sanguine about Maria's return, but I could not help divining some sinister meaning behind it. That she was not dead, I had long suspected, but how had she the audacity to stage her resurrection here? That she was alive, and here in Strelsau, seemed to me to presage some great disaster in which she must be intimately involved – nay, more, a prime mover. I wished her in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires – at the devil. My father, had he lived today, had he known what I knew, would surely have put a bullet through her before she could cause more trouble. Or would he? My father was a gentleman, after all.

So Maria lived, and the days went by, and nothing happened. Oh, she was news: her name was on the lips of all I spoke to (save Mama, who I believe thought it best not to speak to me of my old shame) but she seemed to be living a blameless life. Even where the combination of her elderly, unmarried, protector and the Countess von Regensberg (who was too influential to be called _notorious_ , though the same courtesy was not always extended to those she took under her wing) ought to have barred many a respectable door to her, she charmed, she blushed, she swept all mistrust away before her. While I was devoutly thankful that she did not call upon us, I could not help feeling snubbed.

At length, the storm broke.

  
I was on my guard from the moment I heard the knock – a commanding crash that would hear no refusal. I glanced out of the window, and caught my breath on sight of the sleek black carriage, and the arms that adorned its doors.

It had been a long time since last I was called to the palace, and it worried me that I was now. All I could think was that Mama had been taken ill. I did not wait for Fischer to announce the visitor, but ran down the steps to demand of the footman, 'My mother?'

'I beg you to calm yourself, madam; all is well. His majesty has expressed a desire to speak with you.'

'About what?'

But he shook his head, and proffered his arm to help me up the step.

The carriage was occupied – the Baron von Festenberg, the king's secretary, sat there. He rose awkwardly to greet me. 'Hrmph! Countess von Tarlenheim! It's a pleasure!'

'Baron von Festenberg. Likewise.' But I was too anxious for pleasantry. 'His majesty has summoned me.'

'Hrmph! Indeed.' He sat again, folding his arms, his whole attitude suggesting that, even if he knew the reason why my presence was required so urgently, he had no intention of telling me. I devoted the short journey to wondering, fruitlessly, what the cause might be. I did not think now that there could be anything wrong with Mama; they would have told me. It was, I supposed, possible that a marriage had been arranged and I was to be appointed to wait upon the new queen, whoever she might be. But Mama would have known, and prepared me – and why call for me so suddenly? I feared some sinister meaning, but, try as I might, I could not divine what that might be.

  
My unease became outright consternation when I was shown into the king's study and found, beside the king's majesty himself, the Count of Winterstadt (whose presence alone would have set me watching myself very carefully), the Count of Luzau-Rischenheim (he at least posed no threat, surely!) – and Maria Adler. I could not suppress a start when I saw her. She saw it and smiled, slow and satisfied. I was fearful indeed as I knelt to kiss the king's hand.

'Countess,' he said, 'my grateful thanks for your presence.'

'An honour and a pleasure, sire,' I responded.

'I apologise for the melodrama,' he said. 'It wasn't, perhaps, strictly necessary.'

Count von Winterstadt made an indistinct noise and turned rather redder in the face. I took that as a serious endorsement of the king's self-deprecating quip, but I knew better than to laugh at either of them.

'None the less,' the king pursued, 'it is on an urgent and vital matter that you have been brought here.

I inclined my head.

'As you are well aware, the problem of Mittenheim weighs heavy upon us.'

You know what I thought of the Mittenheim question. I prayed that it was not showing in my face, or my voice, when I said, 'Indeed, sire.'

'As yet, the Grand Duke has not shown any open aggression. I expect it daily. The distraction in Glottenberg has vexed me out of all patience. I cannot keep any troops there another week; I need them on the border!' His narrowed eyes showed his agitation. A moment, and he composed himself. 'But that's by the bye. I need to know about Mittenheim. I need to know what is discussed at the Grand Duke's court. I need to know them, see them, hear them think!'

I detected a hint of Red Alex's rhetoric there. I murmured, again, 'Indeed, sire.'

'You and Miss Hentzau will not attract suspicion. I need her in Mittenheim without delay. The Countess von Regensberg has agreed to chaperone you; the other arrangements are all in place. She will be my eyes, my ears. Count – if you would continue?'

The Count von Winterstadt said, without further preamble, 'The Count of Luzau-Rischenheim has formally recognised Miss Adler, as she was, as his _protégée_ , and conferred upon her the right to use her late father's surname. Miss Hentzau, having spent the greater part of her early life abroad, is eager to see more of her new-found homeland and, being moreover a devoted student of Ruritanian history, wishes to visit certain sites of importance in our country's story. The province of Glottenberg is of course out of the question at the present time, but Miss Hentzau is keen to study Ruritanian influence in Mittenheim.'

This did not surprise me in the slightest. I nodded, and the Count continued, 'A knowledgeable, discreet companion of Miss Hentzau's own age is of course essential. This, Countess, is where you come in.'

My throat dry, I said, 'I rather thought it might be.'

'It may be, of course, that Miss Hentzau takes a fancy to Mittenheim. She may wish to remain there for several months. You need not fear, Countess von Tarlenheim; you will be moving in the best society. Countess von Regensberg will make sure of that.'

'It sounds most diverting,' I said, with a gaiety that I was far from feeling.

'I am glad to hear it. May I take that as consent?'

I did not dare refuse. 'I am at his majesty's disposal, of course.'

The Count nodded, with a smile that chilled me. 'Indeed. As are your mother and brothers, perhaps even more so than you are yourself.'

I bit my lip. 'If I might ask...?'

'By all means.' The King waved a gracious hand.

'What you say about Miss Hentzau is undeniable. Her talents are beyond question, and the story you propose to tell about her is very plausible. But what purpose can I serve?

The king laughed. 'Why, my dear Countess, I am not unacquainted with your own gifts! I will never forget the priceless service you rendered to me at Zenda. No, you will be very valuable.'

But Maria smiled once more, and I knew the truth: I was to go with her because she had asked for me.

  
I tasked her with that, afterwards. She did not trouble to deny it.

'At the very least,' she said, 'it will be amusing. Or have you spent so long with Theresa von Strofzin that you've lost all sense of enterprise?'

I was obliged to admit that, even in the face of the suicidal danger of this mission - and (more) its futility, given the fact that Mittenheim continued despite all provocation in its placid innocuousness - the thrill of adventure was quickening my blood. I fell back on the practical objections. 'Does not the Grand Duke know you? Surely you were in his pay.'

Maria shrugged her shoulders. 'He too knew Markus Hentzau.'

'He must see the connection! How many illegitimate children can Rupert Hentzau have fathered?'

She did not trouble replying to that question. 'You'll come, anyway.'

'Since my presence is required. Or ought I say, desired?'

'Shall we say,' Maria suggested mildly, 'that, were you to remain in Strelsau, you would find your native city considerably less hospitable than anything you might encounter in Mittenheim.'

She had me, I saw in very short order, exactly where she wanted me.

  
'Out of the question,' Mama said. 'I am not having you chaperoned by that woman.'

I frowned. 'I know her reputation as well as you do.'

'It's not _her_ reputation that concerns me,' Mama said. 'It's that of the girls she chaperones.'

'It isn't as if I wanted to go,' I said, sulkily. 'The king commands me. I hardly have a choice.'

Mama stirred her coffee with force enough to send it splashing into the saucer. 'You are not in the king's employ.'

'You are,' I reminded her. 'As are Heinrich and Leopold.'

'Oh,' she said, softly. 'Is that how it was?'

'That, and for Ruritania.' And - I did not say - because Maria Hentzau had requested my personal assistance very particularly, and had reminded me how much she knew about _my interesting tastes_ and _my virtuous cousin Theresa_.

Sick at heart, I prayed that Mama could somehow persuade the king that my presence was not required; but when she returned from the palace that evening her face was grim, and I knew then that I was doomed to go to Mittenheim with the most dangerous woman in Europe.

  
Nor had I only to tell Mama.

'Do you trust me?' I asked Theresa.

'Of course. Why do you ask me now?'

I could not help laughing, even as I thought how perilous the venture was. 'I am to go to Mittenheim. With Maria Hentzau.'

A shadow crossed her face, but she was serene as ever when she said, 'My love, you know now what she is. Therefore I trust you. It is the king's work, I suppose?'

'Indeed,' said I.

She seemed more saddened by that fact than by my enforced proximity to my former love. 'Be careful,' was all she said when I left her.

  
The days flew past. Mama saw to my wardrobe; the Countess von Regensberg had offered to make the arrangements, but my mother refused to let the woman have any more influence over me than was strictly necessary. I was obliged to spend some time alone with Maria, learning the story that she intended to tell. She watched me with a satisfied smile, like a cat who knows she has the mouse cornered but does not yet care to kill it, and made no advances to me during these meetings. Why should she? I would be abroad soon enough, and even more surely at her mercy.

  
My last meal with my mother would have been a sombre occasion; but Leopold joined us and kept us smiling with his constant flow of chatter. He had not been appraised of the true circumstances of my visit, and was conspicuous in his avoidance of the matter. Goodness knows what Mama must have said to him to warn him off the subject of the Countess von Regensberg, of whose reputation he was equally well aware, but her name was not mentioned once. No more was that of Maria Hentzau, which was suggestive in itself, for Leopold had been one of the most vocal in admiring her. But for those little details, an observer might have thought this a commonplace dinner in an ordinary household. It might have been any day but this, and that very thought sent the tears prickling in my eyes, that this might be the last time we sat and ate together.

Only when Leopold got up to leave did he embrace me with more feeling than usual, and whispered, 'For God's sake, Elsa, be careful!'

Mama hugged me tighter, and said less.

  
Then I went to see Theresa. She took me to her study, and I closed the door and held her very close.

'Must you go?' she murmured, and then, 'Yes, of course you must. Forgive me.'

'Would that I did not have to!' I covered her face with kisses. 'I will return, I swear it!'

At that, she broke loose from my embrace and gripped both my hands, hard enough to be painful. 'You would not say that unless you feared you might not.'

I struggled to deny it; I did not admit it in so many words, but she knew me well, and the love and pain in her eyes told me that she did not believe me. I was indeed under no illusions. It was of no use to speak in half-truths and evasions: I was a spy, and if Mittenheim found me out I could expect never to see my home again. A slow death at the enemy's hands – and the Count had used precisely those terms – or a swift one at my own. The Count had indicated that the latter would be preferable for everyone concerned. I wore a new locket around my neck, and inside it was a little pill that would see me dispatched from Mittenheim, and this world, in short order. I could not tell Theresa this; but she must have guessed at something of the sort, and seen no help for it.

And I trusted my allies less than my enemies. The devil knew what Maria would do, if she did not have her way. I did not think that I would see Strelsau again, but I said, very low, 'If I am on this earth, I will return to you, and the whole house of Hentzau shall not keep me.' A fierce impulse seized me; I caught Theresa to me and it was all I could do to keep myself from crying to her to come away with me, to leave Ruritania for some place where we might know peace, and the King be damned, and Maria Hentzau be damned to the depths of hell. And Theresa was kissing me, with such longing in her lips as would send me quite distracted.

'Elsa,' she breathed, 'today at least I am yours.'

I looked at her, the hot blood staining her lips and cheeks, summoned by my churlish passion, her fair hair dishevelled by my rough caresses, and I thought I would die as I stood there. It took all my self-possession to let her go.

'Only today, my love?' I said, trying to quell the trembling in my voice. 'I am yours for ever.' And I smoothed a tress of her hair back into its place, and I kissed her once more, and I left her.


	6. Diversions in Mittenheim

I played much the same part in Mittenheim as I had in Ruritania: the young society lady, yet unmarried, seeking perhaps a husband or perhaps a flirtation, but making no overt effort to ensnare either. There was little enough difference between the settings. Still there was society; still there were balls; still there was gossip. The Mittenheimer gallants, sensing excitement, flocked around Maria; one or two paid court to me. Gertrud von Regensberg encouraged them in this, though I cannot imagine what she would have done had any of them gone so far as to propose marriage to me. I followed dutifully in the steps of the dance that Gertrud and Maria led. In the glass I saw an empty-headed Strelsau lady, but my mind worked – as I have no doubt theirs did – without ceasing, observing, ever-watchful for a hint or a clue to any menace that might lurk, waiting to pounce on our king or our nation. For, though I believed Mittenheim as harmless as any of our neighbours, yet if I must be proved wrong I would at least be the first to know of it.

There was a strange gaiety to Mittenheim that summer, a mad, flushed-cheeked whirling, as if the people dare not stop their dancing for fear they would lose their footing and fall. And the abyss was not far from them. There was, we were told over and over, no money in Mittenheim; it had all gone to France with the Comtesse Sainte-Catherine-les-Bois. And yet the champagne flowed and never ran dry; the white new houses gleamed in the July sun; the music never stopped. The Grand Duke married amid much expensive splendour, and suddenly there was a craze for fichu blouses and tight coats in honour of his Austrian bride. Mittenheim danced on into disaster – or so we were told. For, after all, there was no money.

  
The Viscount of Unterbergland, having consumed quite a considerable quantity of champagne himself at one of Gertrud's parties, told me otherwise. 'Oh, there's money in Mittenheim,' he said. 'At least, there's coal, which ought to be the same thing.'

'Why isn't it, then?' I asked.

'The trouble is,' he explained, pleased by my attentiveness, 'the bulk of it belongs to old Whiskers Hantchov, and he hasn't the money to convert it into money. No capital to invest, d'you see?'

'Couldn't a loan be arranged?'

'It could,' he said. 'It could and it has; but he's no sense of business. He's had loans before and we might as well have poured the money into the river. No one will lend to him now. Worse: he's lost control of his tenants. Even if he could get a mine sunk he'd have no miners to work it.'

'And this gentleman has all the coal in Mittenheim?'

He nodded vigorously, sending champagne spattering across the carpet. 'All that's of any use to us. The rest lies under the Comtesse Sainte-Catherine's land, and Christian von Strofzin's, so Mittenheim sees the profit from neither. A pity, as they work well. Strofzin's stewards are decent disciplinarians. No credit to him, mind: he hasn't been across the border in five years.'

I made a mental note to discuss this with Theresa, assuming I ever returned to Strelsau. While interesting to me in that particular respect, however, it told me nothing that was not already known. I wondered why the Grand Duke did not take over the Hantchov land – or at least its working – himself. Indulging this landowner in his incompetence seemed to leave Mittenheim needlessly vulnerable.

  
At length – rather too long a length, I fancied, but neither Gertrud nor Maria remarked upon it to me - we were presented to the Grand Duke of Mittenheim. In the palace, as elsewhere, we were dazzled by the opulence that surrounded us: gilt and marble, satin and velvet, brilliant with electric lights and made bearable by the exquisite taste that had bestowed them just sparingly enough. We were swept through a proud succession of corridors and antechambers, each glittering like a jewel casket. Had I not known that Mittenheim danced on the edge of ruin, there would have been nothing here to tell me.

The further in we went, the less I thought about that, and the more difficult it was to suppress my nerves.

The doors swung back. The footmen bowed. I advanced into the chamber, a couple of paces before Maria, and looked for the second time into the face of his Royal Highness Augustus, Grand Duke of Mittenheim. I could not quell the flicker of recognition that crossed my face; but a man whose visage adorns every coin, postage stamp and newspaper must be used to that. He did not recognise me, and that was as well. Had he known it was my hand that turned the key on him in Castle Zenda – well, I would not have been suffered to remain long in Mittenheim, or else I would have been compelled to stay there forever.

Rising from my curtsey at his bidding, I studied his face, looking through lowered lashes. I marvelled at the change that comes over a countenance between slumber and waking. Asleep, dreaming that none could touch him, the Grand Duke had made a flaccid, pathetic figure. I had stayed my cousin's hand when she would have killed him. Now I wondered that either of us had dared so far as we did. There was a cold calculation in his eyes; his jaw was stiff, his beard like a wire brush, and a chilly sense of ruthlessness suffused the whole room. My awe was not entirely sham.

But Maria, who had more to fear than I, who had worked for the Grand Duke when she wore other clothes, and whose very face, once recognised, could mean disaster; who, even if our flimsy story held up, was in a position delicate enough to have her turned away from every respectable house in Mittenheim if he took against her, faced him with as little discomfiture as if he had been the dustman. 'Your Royal Highness,' she said.

'Countess von Tarlenheim. Miss Hentzau. You are both most welcome in Mittenheim.'

We murmured humble thanks.

The Grand Duke said nothing for some moments, looking intently at Maria. I trembled. At last, he said, 'Have you a brother, Miss Hentzau?'

Had I not known the truth of who she was and who she had been, her surprise would have aroused no suspicion in me. She said, 'No, your Royal Highness – nor any sister.'

He raised his bushy eyebrows. 'Your face seems very familiar.'

'It has been remarked that I take after my father,' she said. I, who fancied that I knew her, fancied now that I detected a hint of pride when she said that. 'He – I cannot escape the fact – had a certain reputation.'

The Grand Duke cleared his throat. 'Quite. You were not in Ruritania, then, three years since?'

'I? No, your Royal Highness: I lived in America at that time, with my aunt.'

'Ah.' He thought a little while, then turned to me. 'But you, Countess von Tarlenheim, you must remember Markus Hentzau?'

I prayed that I would not undo us all. 'Who could forget Markus Hentzau, your Royal Highness? I think every woman in Strelsau was half in love with him.'

'You yourself?'

I was blushing. 'At least three-quarters.'

'And he died.'

'Too young,' I agreed. 'Barely eighteen.'

To my intense relief, he turned back to Maria. 'You never heard of him?'

'Never,' she said, feigning disinterest.

'And yet he might have been your brother.'

'It is possible. I dare say he had as much right to the name as I.' She seemed uncomfortable – but then, who would not? 'My younger brother – but what of it? I can never meet him now.'

'It's a pity,' the Grand Duke agreed. I wondered, for a fleeting moment, if he knew her, if they were yet in league with each other, if this elaborate presentation was staged for my benefit alone. But he looked at Maria, and looked at her again, and that lingering suspicion calmed my doubts on that front, at least – though it was clear that he was far from persuaded that our visit to Mittenheim was motivated by innocent curiosity.

  
I might almost say that I did not breathe again until I stood outside the palace, breathing in the cool night air, looking up at the pearly moon that must shine over Strelsau as it shone here. It was with reluctance that I mounted to our cab; with the three of us in there, I felt trapped and sick. Gertrud and Maria were smiling at each other; both seemed pleased enough with how things had gone. For myself, I was merely relieved that we had survived the encounter.

Gertrud went to bed as soon as we arrived at our apartment. I was glad of it; I had no desire to sit up rehashing the whole excruciating evening, and I announced my own intention of retiring.

What Maria did next I do not know, but as I sat in bed reading she knocked at my door.

'Elsa?' Her voice was low, but unafraid. She didn't care if Gertrud heard her, and I did. I considered ignoring her, but she must have seen the candlelight under the door. Reluctantly, I got out of bed and wrapped my shawl around me – a poor sort of armour, but I needed everything I could find.

Holding the handle with both hands, I opened the door.

Maria lifted her chin, smiling complacently. 'Three-quarters?'

'That was for the Grand Duke,' I said, knowing that she would never believe it.

'I thought as much. Seven-eighths, then, or perhaps the whole...'

'Don't flatter yourself,' I said.

She came close to me, took my hand and moved it away from the door handle. 'I believe it's still three-quarters, at the very least.'

'You're mistaken.' My traitor face!

'Oh, no, I think not. Let me remind you.' She still had my hand; she caught the other one now, holding them both behind my back.

'Maria...' I meant it as a warning. Perhaps she heard it as a plea.

'I could tell some stories...'

I looked up into her face; her breath stirred my hair. 'That particular threat is becoming more than a little tiresome,' I said, as bravely as I could manage. 'It may have got me here with you, but it will get you no further.'

'Not even one night, for old time's sake?'

'I remember the last time well enough,' I retorted. 'And if it comes to it, this time I shall be the one who administers the drugs – to one or the other of us. I don't care which.' The little pendant hung still about my neck. I thought I could probably get at it, if matters went so far as that.

She laughed, slow and insolent. 'Very well. You needn't be so jealous of your honour. I remembered how you used to enjoy going to bed with me, and thought I'd offer you the opportunity to repeat the experience, that's all. It's more than your pious little Theresa will ever do for you.'

'I would not ask her,' I said, annoyed to find how fast my breath came.

She released my wrists, and laid her hands one on each side of my face, gently enough, but with a cool authority that forbade resistance. I thought she was going to kiss me full on the mouth – God help me, I wanted her to, then! - but she only brushed my forehead with her lips, chaste as a nun, and released me to return to my cold bed.

I did not sleep much that night.


	7. Startling Discoveries in Two Libraries

The weeks passed. We continued our observation of Mittenheim and its principal cast. I thought the Grand Duke like a bee; grown too old to seek honey, he would not sting without provocation, lest he destroy himself in so doing. Yet make him angry, or frightened, and he might forget his prudence, and strike without mercy or discrimination. I never looked at him without fear.

The new Grand Duchess took to me and – rather, I fancy, against her husband's wishes, drew all three of us into the court circle. I suppose she felt for us as fellow aliens; however it might have been, it suited our purposes. She was in her middle twenties, pretty and thoughtless as a butterfly, with blue eyes and a cloud of fluffy brown hair in which diamonds sparkled like dewdrops. I wondered what she made of the Grand Duke, how much she comprehended of the snares and nets that surely surrounded her here.

  
Amid all the frivolity Maria and I did not neglect our stated course. We were very studious, we two, spending hours at a time reading history books and poking around sites of significance. How the good nuns of St Milburga's would have stared to see us! And indeed, I found much of interest – to a true student of history, that is. Our less orthodox researches were less fruitful. My first notion, that this was all a wild goose chase, and which my antipathy to the Grand Duke had for some time dispelled, returned to my mind.

And then General von Schütz invited us to use his library.

'My dear young ladies,' he said, 'I'm most honoured by your interest in our insignificant past.'

'Not insignificant to us, sir, and our past too,' I said, 'for are our nations not linked by our beloved Princess Osra, who became your Grand Duchess?' I thought of Theresa when I said that; indeed, she was rarely far from my mind.

'Ah! Indeed. A great lady. I came,' he said, 'because I wished to offer you the use of my own books. I have certain volumes and documents that you may find interesting. The construction of the old castle, for example – I have an essay written by my great-uncle which I believe includes some facts not generally known. You would be most welcome to see what else you can find.'

  
We accepted with a gratitude that was, at least on my part, unfeigned. Despite myself, I became absorbed in my pretended task. While Maria pursued our true work (whatever that might have been) assiduously, I began reading in earnest. The casual mention of Princess Osra sparked my imagination, and I found that I was truly interested in her career after her marriage. It was, therefore, to the shelves that General von Schütz had dedicated to recent Mittenheimer history that I devoted my attention.

Maria raised her eyebrows at my sudden interest in history, but she could hardly complain. It made our presence in Mittenheim far more convincing. Indeed, she began telling people that I was sure to be presented with an honorary degree from the University of Strelsau. (Had this been true, I noted with amusement, I would have been the _second_ woman student at that institution; but it was no more likely to happen than was Markus Hentzau to finish his own studies there.)

And it was for my own edification that I took the _Life of Osra, Grand Duchess of Mittenheim_ from the shelves. I sought without success for any mention of the Countess of Lichthus – but then many names that I remembered from childhood tales were missing. The Marquis of Mérosailles figured, but only as a skilful diplomat. The Prince of Glottenberg was almost unrecognisable, but the details that surrounded his story were new to me, and particularly interesting given what Heinrich had reported to me regarding the tale as it was told in Glottenberg. Christian the Highwayman was absent altogether; but then so was the Miller of Hofbau. Indeed, I found that I had known almost nothing of Osra once she had left her native land and all the men who sighed after her. I found in the _Life_ a portrait of a wise and skilful stateswoman, if a proud one and easily angered.

This intrigued me. I worked my way through the rest of that particular shelf searching for one name, and one name only. I was disappointed. Most of the material dealing with the eighteenth century was preoccupied with the influence of affairs outside Mittenheim, and, for that matter, Ruritania. Osra was barely mentioned, except as an adjunct to her husband, or as the sister of the troublesome Rudolf III. My frustration increased with every book I read, until at last I found a slim volume, bound in red and crammed in at the back of the shelf, and entitled _Rose of Mittenheim_.

The Rose of Mittenheim turned out not to be my princess, but her grand duke's mother, whose own life was fascinating, if not exactly what I was looking for. The author dropped several tantalising hints in the early chapters, about 'the noble Claudia, who would clash so dramatically with her high-spirited daughter-in-law', and I tore through the first part with glee, anxious to get to the first appearance of Osra.

Here I was foiled for good. For the last several chapters of the book were missing: ripped out, apparently with some force. I wondered why, and took _Rose of Mittenheim_ to General von Schütz.

The good general turned the pages, sighing. 'Indeed, yes. I'm only sorry that this is so sadly mutilated. I can't imagine how it happened. My uncle, perhaps... a sadly narrow-minded man, though why he didn't destroy the whole thing if he felt like that... I have oft sought to replace this, but very few were printed. Ah! But there is a duplicate of this in the palace library! I wonder whether you might...'

I rather thought I might, myself. Maria was even more pressing on the subject. And the Grand Duchess was indeed delighted to oblige me (and, by tacit extension, my friend and my chaperone) with admittance to the palace library, and Maria and I turned our attentions to the volumes therein.

When the weight of her courtly duties was relaxed, the Grand Duchess would almost always come to find us in the library. She liked to watch me study, I know, but I was poor company when I had my mind on something, and when Maria set out to be charming, she was irresistible. And I was, I suppose, not altogether surprised when Maria affected to be more studious than I was myself, and took to going to the palace before I had so much as breakfasted.

I ought to have seen that the Grand Duchess was transferring her affections from me to Maria. Indeed, I fear that I _did_ see, and was relieved for myself rather than, as I should have been, afraid for her. I knew, more than most, how dangerous it was to love Maria. But I was scared enough for myself, walking on a tightrope in this tiny state that was so like home and yet so treacherously unlike it, and I thought the Grand Duchess ought to learn how to look after herself. I buried myself in a century past and let my companions proceed with their unwholesome work.

  
My ostrich-like preoccupation with the past endured until our tenth week in Mittenheim, when I was dragged rudely into the present by the news of trouble at the palace. In all honesty, I would have remained in ignorance of the affair had it not been for the assiduous efforts of Maria, who invaded my boudoir to announce that all was not well in the grand ducal marriage. 'The Grand Duchess, Elsa!'

'What of her?'

Maria smiled. 'Gertrud said I shouldn't tell you.'

'Well,' I retorted, 'perhaps you shouldn't, then.' I was curious, but my desire to put Maria in her place outweighed my curiosity; besides, I knew that she would neither tell nor withhold any fact that she did not care to.

And, indeed, she laughed. 'Do you believe I care what Gertrud thinks?' Without waiting for an answer, she settled herself on the sofa and began the story that she was so desperate to tell me.

It had begun when the Grand Duchess had involved herself in some question concerning the French ambassador, or, rather, the wife of the French ambassador, 'which you might have noticed, had you not been so besotted with your precious Princess Osra,' Maria said; 'the court has been talking of nothing else for weeks. Anyhow, the ambassador has been recalled; the new one is a bachelor, and the Grand Duke considers himself very much embarrassed. He has forbidden the Grand Duchess from interfering – those were his exact words – in diplomatic affairs in future, and has instructed her to dismiss her other foreign acquaintances.'

That news, at least, shook me. Maria laughed at my discomfiture. There was no need for me to concern myself, she said. The Grand Duchess had defended her friends with spirit; had been rebuffed with the full force of the Grand Duke's wrath; had refused to submit to his wishes.

I cannot speculate upon what lines the argument proceeded, but the effect of the Grand Duchess' disobedience was to prompt an ultimatum from her husband: the Hentzau chit was to leave the principality, and take the Regensberg hag with her. (And, on an afterthought, the Tarlenheim girl as well. I suspect Maria of trying to annoy me.) And, said the Grand Duke, since the Grand Duchess was on such good terms with us, she would be the one to inform us of our immediate departure.

She refused. It must have been like watching a kitten take on a tiger, and to this very day I cannot quite believe that it happened. Not, perhaps, that she defied him in this matter, but that he gave way to her. Did he love her, after all? But if he did, he must surely have fought the harder to expel us. For I was convinced that she had been charmed by me, and captivated by Maria, and I had enough respect for the Grand Duke's mind now that I would not have wagered that he did not know of his wife's susceptibilities.

I observed the Grand Duchess with an attention greater than usual over the next few weeks, and sometimes I fancied I detected a tiny, scared, flame of defiance in her eyes.

  
For all the difference it made to our own work, this political-domestic scrap might as well not have happened. The palace doors remained open to us; the library was as much a treasure trove as ever. The Grand Duchess continued to treat us with open affection; the Grand Duke, with cold courtesy. Maria sent a report back to Strelsau; that was about as far as it went.

  
She was in a fine rage the next morning. 'Read that,' she said, thrusting the newspaper at me the instant I sat down at the breakfast table.

ROYAL MATCH: GEORG OF RURITANIA TO MARRY GRISELDA OF BOHEMIA, I read.

'Good heavens!' I said. 'Well, it's not before time.'

Maria scowled. 'What does the fool think he's playing at?'

I laughed uneasily. I was not accustomed to speaking of my sovereign lord in such terms. 'It changes everything for us – or does it?'

She ignored that. 'And why doesn't Winterstadt inform us? They think they can rewrite the rules while our backs are turned! I don't like this, Elsa.'

'I never liked any of it,' I said, and began to eat my toast with – I flattered myself – something of the air of a vindicated Cassandra.

  
I would like to believe that it was coincidence that led me to _In The Service of Augustus the Just_ , for it certainly had no bearing upon my own interests. I had no quarrel with Augustus the Just, the grandfather of the current Augustus, but I would not ordinarily have opened the book, which was a novel of the sort that I used to borrow from my brothers. I am therefore bound to suggest that somebody – and you are at your liberty to speculate who that somebody might be – led me to that particular volume by some inspired practice upon my psychology. If that is the case, I remain at a loss as to how it was done; which makes me think myself slightly less of a fool than otherwise.

Anyway, there I was, standing before the handsome walnut desk, flicking through _Augustus the Just_ out of sheer curiosity before I returned to _Rose of Mittenheim_ and my real interests, when the book slipped from my hands, and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor.

I exclaimed in mild surprise – and, though I had thought myself alone in the library, my cry was answered. Maria emerged from behind one of the stacks, and rushed to me with touching solicitude. 'What is it, Elsa?'

'Probably nothing,' I said. 'Someone has been using this as a bookmark, that's all.'

'Let's see.'

I unfolded it, as one does, out of sheer curiosity. I'd expected a list of memoranda or a lover's note, but what I saw was a sketch plan, inked in vigorous black on thin paper, folded tight several times.

'You know what this is,' Maria said.

And so did she. There was no title on the drawing, but it needed none. Both of us could tell that it showed the royal palace at Strelsau, floor by floor, with all sorts of details marked upon it, details that I knew to be no more than accurate.

'How comes it here?' I asked.

'How should I know?' Maria retorted.

'You hardly seem surprised at its presence.' That was as close as I dared come to accusing her of planting it.

'O, no. I'm not surprised – that is, I knew we should find something soon.'

'How?' She had seemed overly pleased with herself all along.

'Why, my dear, you've not been paying much attention to her royal highness of late, have you? And no more has _his_ royal highness?'

A plant, then: but a plant to be trusted. It was all too plausible: the little Grand Duchess, thwarted in her games of diplomacy, taking a grubby little revenge. I felt unspeakably grubby myself, taking advantage of it, but it was my duty to act. I stared at the thing. Its import was clear. Augustus of Mittenheim was planning an attack on Strelsau – on the palace itself! I had been wrong – Leopold, Mama, Uncle Sapt himself had been wrong! Could it be true? I looked up at Maria. Her face was triumphantly grim.

'Did you doubt your king's judgements, Elsa?' she asked.

'Never!' I protested feebly.

'Perhaps you should have done.'

'What do you mean by that?' I demanded.

'There's nothing for it,' Maria declared. 'You must return to Strelsau.'

'Why?' I asked.

'Why, to attend the wedding, of course!'

'Why?' I asked again.

'And to show the king that pretty little map. If that doesn't take his mind off Bohemia, I don't know what will.'

I should have asked once more, 'Why?' - but it is easy to be wise after the fact.


	8. Secrets of Maps and Smuts

They sent me back to Strelsau in the care of a respectable lady by the name of Schwartz-Krupp, the general's widow. She, I need not tell you, knew nothing of the secret I took with me. A true handmaiden of the king would, I suppose, have sealed the packet and borne it back, incurious and content but to serve. I, however, had a compartment to myself and my snoring chaperone, and a temptation too great to resist. I spread the plan out on the seat beside me, and studied it closely.

It was good. I could not have drawn a better one myself; indeed, the details it lacked were the very ones that I would have had trouble filling in. The rendering of the queen's suite was perfect; the servants' corridor on the fourth floor, where I had once or twice had occasion to sleep when Queen Flavia was too ill for me to think of leaving the palace, was accurate enough, though the proportions were not quite right. The state rooms were done well; the king's private apartments slightly less so, and there were some parts shown that I would have had to guess at. I looked closer, trying to make out the writing; and I saw it: there, on the fourth floor, one tiny error.

One line: a wall down the middle of the linen closet. I counted, and counted again: perhaps it was simply the fact that the plan was not drawn to scale. No. There were too many rooms. Or, rather, there were more rooms on the plan than there were in the palace today. I knew how that mistake had crept in. The wall in question had been demolished some fifteen months ago. The old linen closet, on the ground floor, had been refurbished to serve as a dark-room (for the king was fascinated by photography); but the sheets had to go somewhere, and so two rooms on the fourth floor had been knocked into one. There had been no end of trouble over it, Mama had said: the workmen pestering the women, the laundry porters up in arms.

Not wrong, then; merely out of date. It suggested that the Grand Duke's sources were not as efficient as he would have hoped – or that he had abandoned any schemes he might have cherished a year since. There was enough here for an assassin, though. The missing linen closet would foil nobody; the King's public rooms were rendered well enough to make an ambush easy, and his private apartments too – down – I stifled an exclamation – down to the dark-room.

The queen's suite – perfect and unchanged. The fourth floor – drawn more vaguely, from a memory that was behind the times. The king's rooms – executed with deadly precision.

I knew now who the Grand Duke's informant was.

I knew – my gorge rising – who had informed that informant.

  
The train halted at Zenda; the jerk of the brakes woke my companion. I had just time to fold the plan into my bag.

'Why,' said Frau Schwartz-Krupp, 'what's the matter, my dear? You look as if you've seen a ghost.'

'My brother was attacked at Zenda, some years ago,' I said. It was true, so far as it went. 'I cannot think of the place without shuddering.'

'Ah! my poor child!' She fussed over me, insisting that I drink some brandy for the shock.

'You must take some yourself,' I said, passing her flask back to her. 'I fear I must have given you quite a fright!'

She did not demur and, to my intense relief, fell asleep again as the train sped up. I was in desperate need of peace in which to consider what I had just discovered. In God's name, what devilish game was Maria playing? She was providing information – new, accurate information, so far as she knew, for what concern had she with linen closets? - to the Grand Duke of Mittenheim – and sending that same information back with me that I might warn the King of Ruritania. Did she expect me to know it for her work? It was not her hand; she must have had it copied. By whom? Was the King indeed in danger? And, if so, was it from Mittenheim or from Maria? She had worked for the Grand Duke Augustus before. Did the King know that? Did he know that hers was the hand that brought down his uncle and left him heir to the Ruritanian throne?

My head whirling, I watched the forest fly past me. I had so little time! What was Maria's scheme? She must think that I would show the map to the King. He, consumed as he was by fear of Mittenheim, would think it sufficient evidence to invade. Even with an exhausted army Ruritania would win, easily. And the King would be most grateful to his faithful servant Maria von Hentzau.

The King wanted an excuse to invade Mittenheim and rid himself once and for all of the man whom he feared beyond all sense and reason. Maria, her eye always on the privilege denied her both by her sex and her illegitimacy, knowing it lay within the king's gift and there alone, sought to give him that excuse.

Why had she been so perturbed by the news of the betrothal? Why should that change anything for her? The King would still distrust the Grand Duke. O, and how short a time I had to think! I put my head out of the window to see where we were, how far it was to Strelsau. A smut flew into my eye, and I bit my tongue to keep from crying out and waking my chaperone. I sat down again to deal with it, pulled the edge of my eyelid away from the eye by the lashes, and let the tears flow. I felt the thing wash out, and put my finger to my face to remove it. There it was, black against the white of my glove. Coal. Coal!

Coal was the answer. Coal explained the significance of the betrothal. The betrothal brought Bohemia into Ruritania's influence, and with Bohemia came coal. A favourable agreement, no doubt, negotiated skilfully by Count Alexander von Winterstadt.

And if Ruritania had Bohemian coal, she had no need for Mittenheim. A king's grudge alone was not sufficient to start a war – and if Mittenheim did not fall, there was nothing for Maria. No wonder she ranted against Red Alex! Now that the King had lost interest in Mittenheim, or so it seemed, Maria was determined to force his hand; for there was no profit for her in Bohemia.

Could the Grand Duke be plotting against my king, all the same? _Was_ he readying himself for another attempt at the Ruritanian crown? I knew that he could not be thinking of open war. Mittenheim was bankrupt. Did he, perhaps, fancy a cheaper road to the palace? I might have believed it – but I could not trust Maria. If she had lied about the map's provenance, it was very likely that she had lied about its purpose.

I could not be sure, and yet the choice must be made.

If the Grand Duke was really plotting an attack on the King – well, a word in Uncle Sapt's ear would double the guard on the palace. But if he were not, and I showed the King that map... ten thousand men must die, and all for an illusion. I thought of Heinz's sickened face. The King must not see the paper.

And yet he must! I could not return to Strelsau empty-handed; I could not destroy the evidence I was bringing back, however much I believed it to be false. We were under orders to remain until we found something, or were summoned home. No recall had been sent, wedding or no wedding. The map, then, must be presented.

I thought a little. Then, making sure that Frau Schwartz-Krupp was still asleep, I tore off one quarter of the plan, very carefully. The remaining three-quarters I concealed within my handbag. I took out my handkerchief, removed my gloves, and bound up my right hand tightly. Then, quiet as I might be, I tiptoed out of the compartment and along the corridor. I peeped through every window until I saw someone I thought might serve my purpose: a young man, travelling alone, engrossed in a book of poetry. His dress proclaimed him a foreigner. I tapped gently on the glass panel that separated us; he looked up, and, seeing me, an expression of pleased surprise spread across his countenance.

'Sir,' I said, when he opened the door, 'I beg your help.'

'If I can be of service, madam, I will be honoured,' he replied. His accent was French. So much the better, thought I.

'My sister elopes tonight,' I said. 'I am sworn to assist her and her lover. They will cross into Saxony and be married there. She has charged me with bringing this map to him – for she is in Zenda, and he does not know the house.' Clumsy with my left hand, I passed it to him.

'I had hoped,' I continued, 'to show it to him myself, and explain what he must do – but I travel with my aunt, and I find that I will have no opportunity to speak to him alone when we reach Strelsau. So I must write a note to accompany it – but you see my hand!'

Thank heaven, he was a romantic! 'You would have me write it for you?' he asked, eagerly.

'Would you, sir?'

'It would delight me,' he said. 'You have pen and ink?'

I had. I dictated, and he wrote on the back of the paper, ' _Anton – Sabrina waits for you in the chamber of Barbara and Lisl the maids. You may climb up the servants' stair. Friedrich will look the other way_.' And I showed him where on the plan to make the X – there, in the room that was half a linen closet, these days.

'He will know it is not you who writes this,' he commented.

I smiled, for that was precisely my intention. I said, 'He will trust me if I hand it to him myself. Finish it: _Good luck! Cosette._ Nobody,' I explained, 'calls me Cosette, except Sabrina.' I was blushing, and I hoped he would take it as an apology for the assault on his language.

He wrote – and then, before I could stop him, he dated it! I stifled a squeak of dismay – and thanked him most heartily, and returned to my own compartment. My chaperone slumbered on; to be sure, it was good brandy she carried with her. I untied the handkerchief and took out my pen once more. With very great care, I added a stalk to the _0_ , and _'04_ became _'94_ : a map ten years old, and a tryst that never was. I knew of no impropriety attached to Sabrina von Silvius, but it could not harm her now; she had died of pneumonia in the winter of 1897. Lisl had died, too, I remembered Mama saying, and Barbara and Friedrich emigrated to America after they married. As for Cosette – well, that was a name that said nothing!

I was rather pleased with my solution. Had I known that I dictated the death warrant of an innocent man, would I have done otherwise? I do not know. Mine was not the hand that held the knife, any more than it was the hand that held the pen, and that is all that I can say.

  
In Strelsau I found a cab, and instructed the driver to take us to the palace, where I bade a grateful farewell to Frau Schwarz-Krupp and asked to be shown directly to the King.

My premature arrival caused some stir. The King was summoned; he appeared in short order, pushing his hands through his red hair in his agitation. He hauled the Count von Winterstadt after him. I shivered, remembering what I had to deal with.

The fear that yet haunted me was this: that the Count von Winterstadt knew of this plan of Maria's, and would recognise my work in tampering with it. I thought that he would not protest openly if so – he had no interest in Mittenheim now – but he would know that I had seen through Maria, and that would be fatal.

  
It is galling to be thought a fool, even when one is playing the fool. I do not know how I kept my temper all the while I played my double bluff. I had no desire to convey my ambivalence regarding the Mittenheim project, nor to throw suspicion on Maria herself. I therefore presented the matter as if she and I were agreed on the significance of the clue we had found, but were unsure as to its exact meaning. Let them conclude either that both of us were hopelessly, naively, enthusiastic, or that I alone was, and that Maria had sent me home with a cock-and-bull story to allow her to work unimpeded: either way, I must appear to be a fool.

I told my story: how we had found the map in the grand ducal library, had recognised it, and, thinking it suspicious in the extreme that so accurate a rendering, even of a tiny part of the royal palace, should be found in the very heart of Mittenheim, had deemed it vital that the matter be brought immediately to the king's attention. How I had lost no time in returning to Strelsau and seeking an audience.

The king looked at the count. The count looked at the king.

They laughed. My suppressed, humiliated, irritation was not entirely feigned.

'I don't think this need trouble us,' the king said.

'My dear young lady,' said the count, '(if it pleases your majesty?) 1894, for pity's sake? Oh, I'll have your mother look at it, but you may rely upon it, she'll say the same as I: this is plainly a mare's nest. Some petty little intrigue, ugh! Scarcely worth your looking at the thing, let alone returning from Mittenheim.'

I hung my head.

'Winterstadt, do you think...' the king ventured. 'Ought Countess von Tarlenheim return to Mittenheim?'

Their eyes met again; they thought I could not see them through my lowered lashes.

'No point, really,' the count said. 'We only sent her in the first place because the Hentzau girl wanted her.'

The king cleared his throat. 'Indeed. Well, Countess, I am sure that your mother will be glad of your assistance in the next few weeks. And I shall be delighted to present you to my fiancée. And I am sure that you were coming to find Mittenheim tiresome.'

I tried to look disappointed, and agreed with him enthusiastically.

I was allowed to see the telegram that was sent in return: _Our friend thanks you both for diligence but sees insufficient motive for action at present. Recommend resources reduced by one third. W_

I did not care to think what scheme Maria might invent to prove _sufficient_ motive.


	9. Stagnancy in Strelsau

King Georg married Griselda of Bohemia amid the usual blazing extravagance. Mama wondered, cynically, if Strelsau were not after all getting a little tired of these grand occasions. I saw little sign of this myself, and suspected that it was merely a measure of her own overwork; if the suppression of Glottenberg had rendered the populace ebullient, the marriage seemed to have convinced them that Ruritania was the jewel of Europe and a paragon of nations. Bohemia, one felt, ought to be grateful that Georg had stooped to elevate Griselda to sit beside him. I had some sympathy with this view, of course; disillusioned as I may have been with this last Elphberg, my love for my country burned bright as ever. I only wished to serve it.

But my gloomy prediction had come to pass: I was no part of Queen Griselda's establishment. She had brought her own favourites from Bohemia. Mama's position was unshakeable, but it did not follow that I should gain a place as by right. One Tarlenheim about the place (two, if one counted Leopold) was more than enough for the Bohemian queen. ('I believe the poor child is terrified of me!' Mama laughed. 'No wonder she doesn't care to have my daughter about her!') I found myself, therefore, at frustrated, unwilling leisure. I had comprehensively destroyed my own career as a spy. Neither the king nor Red Alex would have sent me to keep watch over so much as a dustbin now, and the fact that I had single-handedly kept Ruritania out of a needless war could never be told.

Curse Maria! She was right: I craved action, and felt dull and stupid with nothing of importance to occupy me. I tried to see Theresa, but she was curiously elusive; I met her twice or three times in Mama's company or Aunt Magdalena's, and I could see in her glowing eyes that she was glad to see me home and safe, but we were afforded no opportunity to renew our close acquaintance. Time sat leaden on my hands, and I was left with no activity more diverting than sorting my father's books and papers, a task that none of us had yet had the heart to face.

  
'Elsa,' Mama said one morning as we breakfasted, 'I am obliged to go away for some little while.' I must have looked startled, for she hastened to reassure me. 'Nothing is wrong – at least, nothing is wrong with me or with any of your brothers.'

'Where are you going, then?' I asked.

She sighed. 'It will be all around Strelsau before the month is out, I have no doubt. My presence has been requested at Ritterbad.'

I had been to Ritterbad, once. It was the principal Lauengram estate, seat of the Dukes of Elbe, and therefore the King's property. 'With his majesty?'

She shook her head. 'He will not be visiting, or, if he does, it will not be mentioned. The Dowager Duchess is – unwell.'

I was not meant to understand that; but Mama knew very well that I would. 'That is unfortunate,' I said, 'though hardly surprising.'

She looked at me severely. 'Surprising or not, Ritterbad is where I shall be. I shall leave this house in the care of you and Fischer. If you're bored, you might as well have the top floor seen to.'

I nodded. 'I shall continue cataloguing Papa's books.'

  
Leopold was granted two weeks' leave; with Mama away, he took up residence in the family home once more, and bored me almost to distraction with his talk of the new queen and the vagaries of her personal guard. After him came Heinz, still brooding, still trying to keep himself from letting slip to me more than he thought was proper for me to know. I could cheer him sometimes by talking of Sophy Helsing, but this device was by no means reliable; sometimes the very mention of her left him sadder than ever. Dear as my brothers were to me, I found their company trying, and it was with some relief that I received a note from my cousin Theresa.

It was rather aggrieved, was this note; it pointed out that I had been back in Strelsau for some six weeks, and yet I had not visited my own dear cousin more than three times. (So much was true, and as ill luck would have it, we had not been left alone on even one of those occasions. I had not dared so much as to press her hand as I left.) The note informed me that Theresa anticipated a dull week; her sisters were much occupied with – I forget, now, what occupied them – at any rate, they would not be at home, and she would be grateful for my company.

I was glad enough to take the hint. I told Heinz that I was going to visit the Strofzins. I meant, of course, one Strofzin only, but he did not question me. This honest, domestic subterfuge was infinitely preferable to the other sort, in which I had been entangled all through the summer, and I would have woven webs of deception twice as intricate so that I might hold my Theresa in my arms again.

And indeed, our reunion was all that I had permitted myself to dream. My sweet love! she scarcely paused to see that the door was locked before she had drawn me close to her. I surrendered willingly to her innocent caresses, and wondered aloud how I had endured those long months without her.

She, it was plain, had suffered similar torments, and at length, she confessed, 'I feared that you might never return to me. Elsa, I could not have borne it!'

'Oh, it was safe enough,' I scoffed, but I knew I lied. I had been in Mittenheim on a wild-goose chase, but geese have a vicious bite to them. 'I am only grateful to be here with you once more.'

After a little while, we fell to talking. The rumour telegraph was slower than usual: Mama's predicted month was well past, and I was the first to tell Theresa that the King had taken the Dowager Duchess of Elbe as his mistress, and that some fruit of this liaison was expected imminently.

'I am surprised that you had not heard. There was no little comment when she appeared at his side in half-mourning, before I went away.'

'Oh, that.' She dismissed it with a shake of her head and, suddenly serious, pressed my hand. 'I have had other things on my mind, Elsa.' She turned her attention to the papers; it seemed, however, that there was nothing of interest within them, for she laid them aside and caught me to her.

I thought it odd afterwards that she had not remarked upon the news of a Communist uprising in Mittenheim, which occupied a prominent position on the third page. I supposed that she had turned over two pages by accident. For my own part, I regret to say that the name of Mittenheim prompted me to think of Maria – thoughts of fear and repulsion, admittedly, but I felt that I betrayed my beloved Theresa each moment that Maria lurked in my mind. I wondered if she had a hand in this revolution: was she attempting, ever more desperately, to destroy Mittenheim in the hope of gaining the king's favour? If so, this plan too had failed.

  
The name of Mittenheim arose again and again – or, rather, I was particularly alert to its appearance, and I came across it more than once in the course of seeing to Papa's effects. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the majority of those occasions: he had several books on the history of Ruritania's neighbours; I discarded a little collection of Mittenheimer folk tales without doing more than flicking through it; a report on the coronation of Rudolf V from the _Mittenheimer Star_ might, I supposed, prove a minor curiosity. In truth, there was little of interest in any of that. It was only my own concern for our neighbour's affairs that had led me to read the things.

In Papa's private papers, however, I found something that concerned Mittenheim, and something that was of more moment than the ephemera I had passed over. It was a report on an event in the autumn of 1896; a report intended for no eyes but those of Queen Flavia. I recognised my father's handwriting. Turning to the last page, I saw his familiar signature, and that of Uncle Sapt. The third I did not know, but puzzled out the name of Tauber. Martin Tauber, I remembered, was the head of the secret police at that time.

I wish to God I had not read the thing. I wish Papa had burnt it, as he should have done. I would have given a great deal to be told that it was a fiction, that it had never happened. It is, I suppose, a common enough story in any sophisticated nation. A spy – a Mittenheimer spy, or I would not have read it so closely – was captured. It transpired in the course of questioning this man, identified in the report only as 'V', that he was the keystone of a devilish plot to infiltrate the Ruritanian government and murder the queen. His claims seemed far-fetched, but they had clearly been enough to convince my father, Uncle Sapt and, particularly, the good Tauber. But what they had done to him! It made me sick to read it, and I cannot bring myself to repeat it.

Could the end justify the means, if one were by no means sure of the end? They had proved to be justified here, but no one had known that when they began, and had the man been innocent it would have been too late. 'The wretch,' my father remarks, 'was swift to confess his extant and his intended misdeeds, and to identify those with whom he had and intended to commit them. Tauber, however, is a thorough man, and refused to abandon his task until he was sure that there was nothing else of significance to be learned.'

This was – thank heaven! - the only document of the type in my father's papers, but I could not let myself conclude from that fact that this was the only incident. Indeed, two out of the three signatories seemed well practised in this grim art, and the third was by his own admission not surprised. I shuddered.

But would not I have done the same? I knew to my cost that there had been plenty to fear from Mittenheim at that time. Had the death of the miserable 'V' delayed for five precious years the murder of my father? Or, more serious still, the assassination of my queen? I would have dispatched the wretch with my bare hands, if I thought so. A few short months ago I would not have questioned even such monstrous tactics, so they were done in the name of Ruritania. For the name of Ruritania, I would have told you, was synonymous with peace, with justice, with honour. It was only Heinz's stories that had convinced me that Ruritanians could be monsters. It was only my recent experience that had taught me that Elphbergs, too, could employ rogues. Could I believe that of my beloved queen?

My mind ached with the weight of the knowledge. Whom could I trust to relieve me? Mama, I felt sure, could not have known of this, or she would not have turned me loose among Papa's papers, but she was far away. Heinz – no, for it would not have surprised him, and I did not wish to burden him further. Leopold would not understand at all.

  
I went to Theresa. I knew that I could trust her to keep silent, and her calm companionship would soothe my troubled brain. I locked the papers away and, bestowing a sisterly kiss upon Heinz as I left ('don't wait up for me,' he said; 'I'm going to the club,') walked the short distance to the Strofzins' residence.

Uncle Christian was away; Aunt Magdalena was delighted to receive me. 'I'm afraid all the girls are out – oh, except Theresa. She's upstairs, _reading_. I'm sure she will be pleased of a change.' Her tone was doubtful.

I longed to rush up to her, but I was bound to spend a full half hour listening to my aunt's (wildly inaccurate) speculations on the state of affairs at court and the aftermath of the Mittenheim uprising. I did not venture to correct her on any point, and I fear she found me a particularly dull guest.

I did not care a straw. It was plain to me that Aunt Magdalena did not understand Theresa. I must confess that I frequently did not understand Theresa, either, but I loved her fiercely and would happily sit for hours to watch the fervour in her eyes as she railed against a corrupt petty official, or enthused about some brave, pious, working woman into whose sphere her work had thrown her.

When at last Aunt Magdalena appeared as bored as I felt, I excused myself and hurried upstairs. Now that Ninetta, the youngest, was out, Theresa had adopted the schoolroom as her own private study. I tapped gently at the door; it was a moment or two before she called, 'Yes?' No doubt she was wrapped up in some deep thought. I knew those abstracted moods well.

I opened the door and slipped through, closing it swiftly behind me. She was surprised to see me, but in an instant her face was radiant with pleasure. She rose and crossed the room to embrace me.

'Elsa! If you knew how I'd prayed you'd come...'

I pressed her close. 'If you'd prayed _me_ , I'd have come the quicker. Your messenger angels seem to have been delayed.'

She laughed. 'What would you have me do? Place an advertisement in the _Strelsau Gazette_?'

Between kisses, I said, 'It may yet come to that.'

'Who knows?' she said, with a seriousness that gave weight to the platitude.

It was a remark that I was to tear to pieces later, searching for meaning that she might or might not have intended to convey. At the time, however, I only said, 'Not I!'

That seemed to please her. 'Won't you dine with us?' she asked me, her voice light, and suddenly she was the bored society gossip I had once thought I knew, and had despised.

I looked at her sharply. 'I should be delighted, if I were sure that my presence were welcome.'

'Forgive me.' She drew a finger down my cheek. 'Can you doubt it?' she murmured, my own secret Theresa again. If I had doubted, the keenness of her kisses would have convinced me. As for myself, I fear that my preoccupation was evident to her.

'What troubles you, Elsa?' she asked.

Haltingly, I told her of my terrible discovery. I suppressed many of the details: the names (save my father's); the date; the particulars of the action planned and thwarted, and the revenge executed. I told her that a man had died, and died horribly; I told her that my father had seen and approved the deed; I told her that, had it not been done, the queen had died; I told her that, even so, I would it were not done. And then I wept in rage and shame and sorrow.

Theresa did not seem surprised, only sad. She held me close against her, and stroked my hair, and murmured only that she loved me, that she would never cease to love me, and that though all Ruritania, all Europe, stood between us, she would love me still.

  
I found it hard to keep my composure at dinner. It jarred me to see Theresa tattle about nothings with her vapid sisters; it unsettled me still to see how skilfully she donned the mask; but I knew she did it to save us both.

We betook ourselves to the drawing room. Eva settled to her sewing: some piece of froth for her trousseau. I played chess with Hildegarde. The others chattered gently. The hour grew late. Once or twice I made as if to leave, and still Theresa detained me – not by any word or sign, but merely by spinning the conversation out, leaving no space for me to excuse myself.

At last Aunt Magdalena yawned behind her hand-firescreen, and said, 'Elisabeth, I'm sorry. We have kept you far too late. I can't send you home at this hour – and you said that Heinrich is at supper at his club?'

I protested that I would do very well, if only someone would escort me; but it seemed that only Stephen was available. 'Quite impossible,' Eva said.

Aunt Magdalena agreed. 'You must stay with us. I shall send Stephen with _a note_.' Her tone suggested that even this trivial responsibility might prove too much for him.

I was not looking at Theresa at the time, but I would have wagered a look of triumph crossed her face, even if only for a fraction of a second. My innocent love! She knew not what she desired.

  
They put me in what they called the Blue Room, on the first floor, next to Theresa's. I began to suspect that she had arranged it all, although how she had managed it I could not begin to fathom. As soon as I was arrayed in my borrowed nightgown, I heard a gentle tapping at my door. I threw it open. Who else would it have been?

'Come to my room,' she murmured. 'I was stupid: I should have thought that we would not be able to talk.'

I followed her, mute and obedient, feeling the draught creeping along the landing, and the cloth brushing my bare limbs.

But now that we were alone, now that the door was closed behind us and none came to disturb us, we said nothing to each other. I, burdened by the new weight of my awful knowledge, felt myself tainted, unworthy even to look at her. I was uneasily aware, too, that I had not seen her _en déshabillé_ since that night at Castle Zenda when first I learned of her love for me; but then I had been exhausted, half-blinded by pain, my mind whirling. Tonight my head was clearer – clearer, ay, but not untroubled. She looked at me; her gaze was clear and frank, and I was thankful that she could not see what was in my mind then.

'How long,' she mused, 'since we two slept under the same roof?'

'Not since school, I suppose,' I said.

She stood there, beautiful in the firelight, half-veiled by her long, pale hair. The glow of the flames shone through the fine fabric of her nightgown, drawing her form in shadows. I caught her to me; she yielded with a little cry of protest.

'Oh, Theresa,' I groaned. And I turned away from her to leave the room, but she must have caught the shameful desire in my eyes.

  
When I woke she was already long gone. She had, I was told, gone out on one of her virtuous errands. I breakfasted with Aunt Magdalena and lingered as long as I dared, but Theresa did not return. I went home in an ill temper, knowing that I had no one to blame but myself. My mood did not improve when a messenger arrived with a box for me. I took it to my room to open it. There was no message; only a red rose. I caught it up, heedless of the pricking of the thorns, and breathed deep of its heady fragrance. Then, remembering, I laid it down more gently than I had taken it up. If it spoke of sensual pleasure to me, it meant deep, but innocent, love to her. I wore it next to my heart all day, and when I undressed that evening I laid it under my pillow.


	10. The Message of a Rose

The next morning I breakfasted with Heinz, who seemed in better spirits. Mama still being at Ritterbad, and routine having slipped, we had both risen late, and it was already close on ten o'clock.

The first we knew of the unrest was a loud crash, as if of an explosion.

'Hark,' I said, 'what's that?'

Heinz rose and opened the window, the better to hear. The breeze was crisp. Did I only imagine the edge of smoke to it? Far away, there was an angry hum.

'Trouble,' he said. 'That's what it is.'

We looked at each other, then turned and ran, up to the top floor, whence we might have a better view over the city. Peace reigned in our quarter, but a cloud of dense smoke obscured where the palace ought to have been, and something was on fire in the Altstadt.

Heinz ran back to his room and returned clutching his field-glasses. He threw the landing window up, and the roar of human voices reached us even there.

'Look,' he said, 'down beyond the Matthäuskirche.'

I followed his pointing finger. There were hordes pouring from the Altstadt, too far away to make out individual bodies, and all of them heading south towards the palace. The mood was ugly; I could see that much even from our eyrie.

'Your eyes are sharper than mine,' he said. 'What's that thing they're waving?'

I took the glasses, squinted through them. 'A flag of some sort, I suppose. Red, or brown, perhaps? There are placards, too.'

Protests and demonstrations were nothing new in Strelsau. The last few years had seen them multiply like mushrooms, springing from nowhere and as easily pulled up. The police had their orders.

This one was different. This one was organised, and those who had organised it were armed. We could hear sharp gunfire over the yelling and the drumbeats. I had not heard of the police using bullets before, not so early in the day.

Heinz frowned, and, with a sudden decisive movement, turned and took the stairs two at a time. 'This has turned unpleasant. We thought something was liable to happen, but I don't know that anyone expected a show of force. I shall have to go down to the barracks, and see if I'm needed.'

I hurried after him. 'You believe they'll call the army in, too?'

'Wouldn't you?' he shot back, rounding the bend in the stairs.

'I suppose it's the only sensible thing to do,' I gasped, as I pelted down.

'The quicker this is cleared up, the better.' He did not slacken his speed as he reached the foot of the stairs, finishing up where we had started, in the breakfast room.

'But who is it?' I asked, an awful suspicion lodging at the base of my heart.

'The Communists, I would imagine,' Heinz said, and drained his cup of coffee. Of course, it meant nothing to him. So long as Strelsau stood, and stood in the right, he cared not who the enemy was; he would stand to the death against whoever threatened her.

He kissed me once on either cheek. 'Goodbye, Elsa. I intend to be home for dinner; let Johanna know. If it so happens that I'm not, give Sophy my portrait that Mama had taken of me at Christmas.'

'It's beef today,' I told him, striving to keep my tone light, though this day was more grave than he knew. 'You oughtn't miss it.'

And he was gone.

  
Of course it was out of the question for me to to leave the house. Of course I left anyway. As soon as Heinz was out of sight I veiled my face closely and, walking to the end of the street, hailed a cab. The driver was happy to take me, once he heard that I had no intention of going near the palace or the Altstadt. It was not so far to the Strofzins'; in the old days I would have risked walking. I knew, though, that my being caught up in all this would have helped nobody, not Heinz, not -

Well. I knew before I so much as knocked at the door that she would not be there. I asked, for form's sake, for the Countess Theresa. She was not at home.

'I thought she might not be,' I said, and I smiled gently, and had my cab take me home again. There I told Fischer that I would see nobody, unless they brought news of my family, and locked myself in my bedroom, to curse my faithless, lying lover.

For this was her uprising. This was her revolution. This was where all her good works had led her. She had been striving for the kingdom of heaven and, tiring of waiting, had set out to bring it in with her own hands. So much I would have granted her, willingly – but she had not been prepared to ask it of me. How little she thought of me! Did she not think me worthy to know her true self and her real affiliations?

Her red rose lay under my pillow. I drew it out, laid it on the white sheet, regarded it with rage and humiliation. Red for love? No: red stood only for her red flag, and she would throw love to be trampled in the street. That was the true message of this red rose. She did not love me; she could not have served me so if she did. She did not even trust me to keep her secrets. Weeping for anger, I gripped the stem until my fingers tore on the thorns, then I flung the bloom from me, out of the window. It caught in the creeper outside. I did not trouble to release it. Let it fester, I thought.

I kept to my room all that day, until at last Heinz came home and told me that it was all over. He had not himself been needed in the fray; the city guard had all in hand. He had, therefore, spent the day at the infirmary, helping the good sisters as they tended to the injured of both sides. Leopold, had been occupied at the palace; Heinz had seen and spoken to him. No harm had come to my brother, and the royal establishment was little the worse. The fighting had been fiercest out in the streets. Heinz had heard that from Leopold, who had heard it from the Prefect of Police.

No, he said, there had been comparatively few casualties, all things considered. Perhaps a dozen among the troops; among the rebels, a few score. Fifteen had been arrested, and were held now in the prison.

Were they all men, the dead? Why, what a queer thing to ask.

But yes, they had all been men, or so he believed.

(A cold weight lifted from my heart, and left me angrier still.)

And the rebels in custody?

The ringleaders.

No: there had been no women among them. Why would there have been a woman there?

  
She sent no word to me. I cursed her again.

  
Mama returned from Ritterbad as grave as any of us. The Dowager Duchess had (hush!) been brought to bed of a daughter. It was almost a blessing, Mama said, that there had been trouble in Strelsau to distract the people, or at least to demonstrate to them what was the alternative to the house of Elphberg. Strelsau would have forgiven the king a whole harem full of mistresses, and a quiver full of children. Better that than the Bolsheviks. There was once more great rejoicing, a thanksgiving for deliverance from the enemy in our midst. (Did they but know how close to the heart it lurked!) Another palace ball, and I was as reluctant to attend this one as Heinz had been to attend the last. Mama, however, was adamant.

'You must go to this one, Elisabeth,' she said. 'You must be seen there.' Her tone was so solemn that I did not question her.

So I went, sulking. I feared I might see Theresa there, and I feared what I might say to her if I did. I longed to speak to her, but I was too proud to seek her out when she had made it so plain that she had no need of me. And all the while I hoped to see her, for I would gladly have been proved wrong.

I sat at the side of the room with Nikolas and Karl (home from school, and pretending not to be impressed), and watched the guests hovering and swooping. Generals; ambassadors; all the nobility. The Count of Luzau-Rischenheim, cutting a rather pathetic figure on his own. The king, easy and pleasant. The queen, affecting ignorance of the gossip swirling around them. Poor woman! How galling to know, while the king of Ruritania paid one a sordid coal-fuelled suit, his mind was on his uncle's widow! And perhaps, I thought, romantic despite everything, his heart was somewhere else altogether; perhaps he still loved his inn-girl in Leipzig...

My reverie was interrupted. The Strofzins swept in: Aunt Magdalena, resplendent in heliotrope velvet, leaning on Uncle Christian’s arm; Eva, blushing, escorted by her new husband; Hildegarde, whose eyes were already searching the hall for my brother Leopold; Klara, flaunting in sky-blue; and little Ninetta, all in white, tipsy and over-excited at her first ball.

Only Theresa was missing – the whispers reached me quickly: she was unwell - and the lack of her struck me to the heart. I had been so sure that she would be there. Now I was forced to acknowledge the truth of the matter: she would not come; she could not face me.

I watched her family intently: the set faces and forced laughter of Uncle Christian and Aunt Magdalena; the genuine hilarity of the girls, interrupted occasionally by a break in their barrage of conversation – the gaps that Theresa would have filled with a gentle correction or a caustic observation. Sensible of her absence, her sisters were uncomfortable, but clearly thought it nothing out of the ordinary. In their parents, however, I recognised the stiff jaws, the guarded eyes, of those who have a deadly, shameful, secret to keep. I knew that look; I saw it often, in the mirror.

The Strofzins scattered within a very few minutes: the girls variously on to the dance floor on the arms of brave young men or to chatter with their friends; Uncle Christian to discuss military strategy (about which he knows nothing) with Uncle Anton (who knows still less).

And Aunt Magdalena came straight to me. 'Elisabeth.'

'Aunt.'

Her voice was frigid. ‘Theresa is extremely unwell. She asked to be remembered to you.’

‘I am in no danger of forgetting her, believe me,’ I replied, matching her tone. ‘I trust that she will make a swift recovery.’

She looked sharply at me when I said that, and then said, more kindly, ‘It has been a shock to all of us.'

Feeling faintly as if I had been reproved, I made an excuse and turned away. It was a relief to dance with Nikolas, who poured into my ear the triumphs and tribulations of his latest _affaire de coeur_ , and managed, once, to make me laugh. Even so, the evening was torture to me, and I was glad to sink into my bed at the end of the night.

  
And then, when I was as near as ever I had been to forswearing Theresa, there came alarming news from Mittenheim.

The _Mittenheimer Star_ was of course no longer sold in the streets of Strelsau, but such a loyal servant of the Ruritanian crown as Uncle Sapt was able to obtain a copy of this, and certain others, without difficulty, and he brought them round to show Mama. Finding her absent, overseeing the reordering of the palace, he showed it to me instead, and together we compared the stories with their counterparts in the Ruritanian press.

The Grand Duke was dead, stabbed to the heart in his own dressing room. The Guard was searching for a young man who had been seen vaulting the palace wall some forty minutes after the assassination was thought to have taken place. The Grand Duchess would speak to no one; but the _Mittenheimer Star_ 's correspondent had heard that a bloodied handprint was found on the sheets of the grand ducal bed.

A description of the wanted man was appended to this report, and I studied this with some interest. A slim youth of middle height, by his voice thought not to be above eighteen or twenty years; hair, dark and rather long; clean-shaven; eyes, black – but, I supposed, it must have been dark by that time.

This news of course occupied the greater part of the contraband Mittenheim papers; in the Ruritanian press it struggled for ascendancy with a story yet more scandalous, which in the _Mittenheimer Star_ warranted a scant, suspicious paragraph: Maria Hentzau ( _née_ Adler, we were reminded) had vanished from the apartment in the Mittenheim capital where she had been lodging. There were signs of violence about the property. Countess Gertrud von Regensberg was distraught. She prayed, but she feared the worst. She was considering returning to Strelsau for her own safety, but so long as there was a possibility that her beloved ward might be found alive, she felt compelled to remain in Mittenheim.

Speculation ran wild. She was dead. She was being held hostage. The police were searching for her. The police had hidden her. Unspeakable indecencies had been committed upon her person. Her body had been found. Her body would never be found. Her disappearance was an insult to every red-blooded Ruritanian, and the King ought to demand her immediate return, or else take action to retrieve her.

For my own part, I rather thought that the _Mittenheimer Star_ had the right of it, but even they had not hit upon the whole truth. How could they? Even I, who knew how Maria could love and how she could murder, could scarcely believe what must be the truth: that she had put a dagger in the back of the Grand Duke and, without so much as stopping to wash her hands, had taken his Grand Duchess to bed.


	11. Justice in Ruritania

In the days that followed, I read the papers with considerable dedication, but little progress seemed to be made in the unravelling of either mystery. The Countess of Regensberg returned to Strelsau. The Ruritanian press became ever more belligerent in its concern for Maria's well-being; the Mittenheimer press retreated into empty platitudes.

Three days later, I read that the Grand Duchess had been found dead underneath her window, from which, it was surmised, she had fallen. One single Ruritanian paper dared print the word _suicide_ ; others spoke vaguely of more disappearing assassins; some did not mention it at all. A couple of Mittenheimer organs, freed from the fear of libel that had previously enforced their good taste, hinted that the Grand Duchess herself might have been party to her husband's death.

I thought about that, and, to my own horror, found it plausible. Hers was not the hand that struck the blow, I knew that much as surely as if I had stood in the room, but I had seen her grow ever more besotted with Maria, and ever more repulsed by her husband, and I could not have said with certainty that the murder was Maria's work alone. I thought of that bloodied handprint, as vivid in my mind as if I had seen the very sheet, and I shuddered.

And would Maria abandon a friend, a lover, to the hideous hand of justice? Assuredly. As she had once served me, so she had done to the Grand Duchess, and worse. Maria had set a honey-pot before her, and left her caught in the sweet, sticky poison while she made her own escape. Poor, pretty butterfly!

Only now did I let myself imagine what might have come to pass had I remained in Mittenheim myself, had I not let myself be sent home on that fool's errand. If the Grand Duchess was dead, if Gertrud von Regensberg had fled (for so we were now hearing) in terror for her life, what would have become of me? What would become of she who had been (in the eyes of the world, at least) the disappeared Maria's closest companion, and who had, moreover, not the slightest idea of what she was actually doing there?

It might, I supposed, not have happened at all, had Maria's first plan come off. By now Mittenheim would be occupied, the Grand Duke perhaps still alive, if he could tolerate the diet of dust he found at the King's feet. By now Maria would have tired of the Grand Duchess, but she would at least have left her alive. By now I might have persuaded Theresa – I did not let myself pursue that thought.

Sickened by Maria and Theresa, by the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess, Mittenheim and Ruritania, I found Karl and went out walking.

  
We had intended to go to the public gardens and seek some respite from the company of our disappointing fellow humans in the charms of nature, however subservient it might be to the tastes and fashions of those same humans. Myself, I would gladly have retired to a hut in the forest and never spoken to another soul, but this proved impractical on a Saturday morning in Strelsau. Indeed, we found it impossible even to reach the public gardens, such was the crush in the streets. We persevered as far as the Elphbergplatz, where we were compelled to admit defeat.

Karl accosted a passer-by. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Haven’t you heard? They’re hanging the Reds.’

Hanging! Realisation broke upon me like a thunderclap. I understood all at once, and almost swooned.

Thank God they misunderstood my exclamation of horror. The man said, ‘You’d better take the lady home, sir.’

But I would not have left the place if I could, and the crowd closed around us, pressed us forward, nearer and nearer towards the gallows. I could not gauge the mood; murmurs of sympathetic outrage contested with mocking jeers. Queen Flavia would never have allowed a public execution. How long ago seemed her bright reign! How deep the gloom that enveloped Ruritania now!

Karl tried to hurry me away, but I would not move. I gazed at the line of the condemned, studying each face, fearing to find that one I loved, hope and dread growing in equal measure as I scrutinised the features. She was not there.

I watched them die. Eleven men, brave men for the most part, facing death with equanimity or defiance. One of them, the harsh-voiced, falcon-eyed man I had heard speak once, met my eye as they led him to the scaffold. I half-thought he recognised me as Theresa's erstwhile companion, though only once had I slipped into her world of futile plots and impossible ideals. I tried to read his expression, but could make nothing of it. I suppose that we were speaking different languages, with no words between us; he thinking, I assume, of the great new order that he had failed to bring in; I, of the tiny world of my paltry little heart.

Theresa! Was she dead already, and my last thought of her a curse? Had they feared to make her a martyr by executing her in public, and instead murdered her behind some locked door? The cold poison, or the wicked knife? Torturing myself with useless speculation, I turned and forced my way out of that grim square, Karl hurrying behind me. He was scared: he had rarely seen me less than composed, and we had both seen violent death; there was, so he thought, no reason that this should distress me so.

It was not long before he caught me. 'Elsa...'

I slowed my pace, and breathed deep of the foul city air. 'Take me to Uncle Christian’s,' I begged him.

'Yes,' he said, 'that's sensible. It's closer than home.' He took my arm, and I was grateful to lean upon him. There were no cabs to be had; we walked.

'You were looking for someone?' he asked, gently. 'In among those men who were executed?'

'I had friends, once,' I said, cautiously, 'who used to speak as those men spoke, who held those ideals. Every time there is a report of some Communist uprising, I wonder if they are among them.'

He coughed. 'Were any of those...?'

'I knew the face of the last man who died. I never met him to speak to. It was years ago.'

I could see that he was curious, but he did not press me. Young as he was, he could tell that it was a dangerous thing for either of us to know.

  
The walk, short as it was, seemed to take hours. Anxiety tore at my throat.

At last we stood on the doorstep. I grasped Karl's hand. 'You need not wait for me,' I said as the door swung open and we were shown in.

He looked worried, but acquiesced. 'I'll walk home,' he said, 'and have the carriage sent here for you.'

And with that, he was gone, and Aunt Magdalena met me in the hall.

'Where is Theresa?' I demanded.

My aunt's face was as hard as marble, and as cold. 'You have heard. She is ill.'

'But where is she? In this house?' I was ready to fight my way past her mother and tear the building apart if I thought I would find her.

My aunt seemed to think the same. 'She is not here. She has been sent to a – hospital.'

A hospital? A prison! 'She is, then, at liberty to leave?'

'My dear Elisabeth: you do not understand. She is not well.' A tear was glistening at the corner of my aunt's eye. In my fury I disregarded it. 'I had thought that perhaps she had shared with you some of her delusions – but I see I was wrong. You do not know. You will understand, then, my consternation when the police brought her home to me, saying that she had been found with the – the Communist vandals in the streets. Her mind is disturbed. How else could she have become involved with those – those common men? Indeed, she is safer where she is now.'

'But where is she?' I cried.

'As I say: she is quite safe. She is in the care of Dr Wolff, whom I dare say you will remember, at his establishment in the Hauptwald. He has expressed some hope of being able to help her.'

This, then, was the truth. A sweet relief flooded my soul. She lived! And, as quickly, anger and fear displaced it. Theresa was sane, I knew – dangerously sane, in this mad world. 'How can he help her, when she isn't ill?'

My aunt's voice was colder than ever. 'By keeping her – as I have no doubt you have seen and understood today – from the gallows.'

She was right, that was the worst of it. But I remembered Dr Wolff, and I trembled for Theresa. 'By locking her away!'

‘The police found her in the thick of the trouble. We spared her the humiliation of a trial.’

‘You denied her a fair trial - or any trial at all!’ For that, I knew, would anger Theresa most of all.

'Elisabeth,' she said, 'I think you had better go.'

  
All the way home, I cursed myself for a proud, blind fool.

Theresa had known how this would end. She had not doubted my honour; she had doubted her own scheme – and, it turned out, for good reason. She had kept it all from me not because she could not trust me to keep her secrets, but because she feared she would drag me to shame and destruction with her.

Karl met me as I entered the house; seeing my face, he did not attempt to detain me. I rushed upstairs and threw myself face down upon my bed, to abandon myself for some brief minutes to remorseful tears. I searched under the pillow – then I remembered.

I leaned far out of the window to retrieve her rose – its petals faded and falling, its leaves parched – and held it to my heart, praying that it might yet be granted to me to find her, to save her from that hell to which she had been sent. If tears could have revived it, it would be blooming now. Ah! but tears were of no avail, and Theresa had taught me long ago that prayers must be matched with action. I watched late that night, sat writing until my candle had burned down to its socket. Then I burned every word that I had written.


	12. Elisabeth Raises the Stakes...

The next morning I went to see Nikolas von Werdenstein.

'Elsa!' he said. 'By Jove, it's good to see you! I'm in the devil of a scrape.'

'Not half as big a scrape as I'm in, I'd wager,' I said. 'But tell me about it.'

He lit a cigar. 'The fact is, my dear Elsa, that I shall very shortly have to propose to your cousin Klara von Strofzin, unless I can see a way to get out of it.'

'Nikolas!' I said. 'What possessed you to flirt with an unmarried girl?'

He prevaricated, and then confessed that his previous inamorata – a married lady whom I shall not name – had put him up to it. I wondered privately what her motives were. Did she wish to rid herself of Nikolas, or merely to render him respectable?

'Klara won't let you carry on with other women after you're married,' I told him. 'She's almost as high-minded as Theresa.'

'I know,' he groaned. 'I shall have to go abroad.'

'You might take me with you,' I said, seeing the glimmer of a hope.

'Indeed? Ah, yes, your own scrape. Will you tell me?'

'Well,' I said, 'if I had to choose from among the Strofzins, you would be welcome to Klara.'

And I told him the tale that I had long owed him. He listened with courteous attention, only occasionally interrupting to clarify some detail, or exclaim, 'Hentzau! Good God!'

When I was done, he laughed and said, 'Well, you fooled me very prettily!' He seemed delighted with the idea that, while he had been pursuing the married women of Strelsau, I had been pursuing or pursued by the unmarried ones. Then he frowned, and smoked a whole cigar in silence before commenting,'If half what you have told me is true, your Theresa ought to have been hanged.'

'I have no doubt that she would rather she had. And yet -' I glanced over my shoulder to see that the door was shut, for I too spoke treason now, 'I find I cannot argue with her diagnosis, even if I deplore the treatment.'

Nikolas would not answer that, of course. 'What do you propose to do?'

'Why, get her out, of course.'

He laughed at that. 'I had surmised as much from the moment you told me where she was. I meant, have you an idea how to go about this?'

I told him.

  
We were married two weeks later.

Our families were surprised by our sudden engagement and our insistence on an equally sudden wedding, but, no doubt remembering how it had ended last time, acquiesced with remarkably little fuss. Indeed, our haste was generally thought to be something to do with the rumour that all regiments were soon to be recalled to barracks, in order to deal with the Mittenheim question once and for all. Heinz teased me gently about being desperate to pip him to the post; Leopold thought it odd, not so much that we were marrying swiftly, but that we were marrying without taking advantage of the occasion to do the thing with style.

I do not know what Mama thought. She must have known that our motives were not those of the average betrothed young couple, but she never spoke to me of what she hoped or feared might come of this marriage. Perhaps she was simply glad to have me off her hands. I have no doubt that Nikolas' father felt similarly. Given his son's oft-declared intention to die a bachelor, and his propensity to fall in love with one unsuitable lady after another, he must have been glad even of this slender hope of continuing the great line of Werdenstein.

I tremble to think what Uncle Christian and Aunt Magdalena made of it, though perhaps they tell Klara that she had a lucky escape.

  
As for what Klara's sister might think – well, that was a matter of great worry to me.

'We must get word to Theresa,' I said. 'I cannot risk her hearing about our marriage and believing that I have abandoned her.'

'You could write,' Nikolas said.

I shook my head. 'I could not be sure of its getting to her. Any letter I might write to her would be read; any letter telling her that this marriage is a sham would betray our plans; and if they know of her regard for me, even if they do not believe it to be reciprocated, any letter wherein I expressed my deep happiness would be deemed to upset her and might be suppressed.'

'How, then do you expect her to hear of our marriage at all?'

'Her sisters will gossip. Besides, the hospital takes all the papers. Dr Wolff does not believe it healthy for the establishment to be removed completely from the world; his intention is that his patients resume their old haunts and habits wherever possible.'

'Ah, yes; I see. Very bad for business if they're never heard of again.'

'I fear Theresa might be the exception to that rule,' I said, remembering once more that she was there not for treatment but for punishment.

'Well,' said Nikolas, 'if they'll let her have the papers, I'll let her have something to read in them. I have a friend at the _Gazette_ , and it might be pleasing to have a companion piece to the announcement of our union...'

We composed it together. I was rather pleased with the result:

_Red rose: they say things of you that I know to be untrue. When you hear of what I have done, do not let your heart be troubled. Know that I love you, and you will not wait long for me._

Nikolas' friend at the _Gazette_ must have thought him a cad. He must have wondered, too, at Nikolas' insistence that this go in on the same page as the weddings, and on the reverse of any piece about the failed revolution. I worried, when I was not worrying about Theresa, that wonder would turn to suspicion, and that Nikolas too would end up hanged or incarcerated. He laughed off any such idea, and it transpired that his faith in his friend was not misplaced.

  
The King sent me a kind little note, wishing me all the happiness that the blessed state of matrimony could confer, and earnestly desiring to know what gift or favour that lay in his power to bestow up on us he might add to that. Here was a chance indeed! Oh, it might be a risk to show our hand so early, but if it came off it would make our gargantuan task easier by some considerable degree.

Emboldened by the condescension, I took Nikolas and Mama with me to the palace the day before the wedding to wait with the King's other petitioners. I was, I confess, flattered to see that two ambassadors and a duke were shuffled out of the way before us.

When Mama had left us to attend to her duties, the King said, 'My dear children -' (he was, I remembered, no older than I, and two or three years younger than Nikolas) '- my very heartiest congratulations.'

Nikolas stammered something grateful, and my thanks were as pretty as I could make them for the royal wishes both spoken and written.

'Ah! yes!' he said. 'I begged to know, did I not, what I might give you as a wedding present. Have you come to tell me?'

'We have,' I said, 'though I fear it may be beyond even your great power to grant us.'

That needled him. 'I most sincerely hope not,' he said, 'and you may be assured that I shall do my utmost to prove you wrong there. Tell me!'

I looked at Nikolas. 'My fiancée,' he explained, 'is greatly troubled on account of her cousin, the Countess Theresa von Strofzin.'

The King's eyelids flickered in recognition at that name; that was a bad sign. 'I believe the lady is unwell,' he said, repressively. 'I am most deeply sympathetic – but I don't quite see what I can do, unless her illness improves.'

'Illness!' I exclaimed. 'No! -' as Nikolas raised a hand as if to quiet me. 'Forgive me, your majesty, but I must speak! Your majesty, my cousin is not ill, unless it be illness to love her country and serve her king!'

I had all his attention now. 'What do you mean?'

'They call her mad, your majesty; I know it. They say she has been seduced by these deluded vandals who call themselves Communists!' I tried not to think how she would hate this account of her, if she heard it; but it was the only way to save her. 'It is not true! it cannot be true! She is a good woman, a holy woman; she loves the poor of this city, and I freely admit that it is possible that she has seen, perhaps spoken to, the leaders of this foul revolt. But she could never have joined them. She is a Strofzin, your majesty – as am I.'

He frowned. 'The Count von Winterstadt is convinced that she was party to the most treacherous plots. Were he not at this moment in Mittenheim, seeing that my wishes there are fulfilled, I would request that he explain to you... Forgive me – I do not wish to cause you pain.' But he seemed shaken by my feigned conviction.

'Then why has she not been put on trial and executed, as the plotters were?' I demanded. This sentiment was more to Theresa's taste, and I uttered it with the deeper feeling. 'Call her a traitor if you believe her to be so – but don't, I pray you, call her mad, don't have her shut away without trial or appeal.'

The King's mouth narrowed to a grim line. 'Count von Winterstadt -' he said again.

'Your majesty -' there were tears in my eyes, 'there is a tale of which you know only the half, and which the Count does not know at all, for at the time he was so concerned with the health of his little ward, Luise of Andersheim, that he was not able to come to your majesty's aid.'

An ironic smile. 'You refer to that incident at Zenda? When the Grand Duke of Mittenheim made his first attempt to claim my throne?'

'I do. Your majesty, I was not alone that night. Indeed, I would not have been there at all had it not been for my cousin. General Sapt could not have brought the troops in without her warning. And she would have killed the Grand Duke herself had I not stayed her hand.'

The King laughed, without humour. 'I could wish you had refrained. But continue.'

'She it was, your majesty, who, at grave risk to her own life, distracted the would-be usurper's guard, allowing me to retrieve the sceptre of Heinrich the Lion. She is devoted not merely to Ruritania, but to your majesty's self as the personification of Ruritania.'

I was in absolute earnest where the facts were concerned, and lying through my teeth about my love's motives – and my own. For, as I had hinted to Nikolas, I doubted that the present monarch stood for Ruritania in any sense beyond the titular, and I despaired, now, of being able to change anything.

It had been easier for my father. He had known where to find a better king. All that was left to me was to save what I could.

'And what,' the King said to Nikolas, 'is your own opinion, Captain von Werdenstein?'

Nikolas said, 'I trust my fiancée's judgement completely in this matter. As your majesty may know, I had some small involvement in the Zenda affair myself, but it is as nothing beside the contribution of my dear Elisabeth and her cousin. I am indeed surprised that she is held on such grounds as this.'

The King chewed his lip. 'The fact remains that she was there, in the very heart of the trouble.'

'Ministering to the dying, and with true Christian charity refusing to discriminate between rebel and patriot!' I was shouting. Nikolas was staring at me. I cut myself off when I realised it. Strange, that I could put so much feeling into an excuse I didn't believe. I heard my own voice echoing hysterically around the room, and dying to silence.

I dropped my eyes, cursing myself. Surely it was all ruined now. I had failed: Theresa would stay locked in that hell-hole for ever, and I would marry Nikolas, and Alexander von Winterstadt would disembowel Mittenheim with efficient, ruthless slices, and Ruritania would lurch towards destruction in the hands of this deluded monarch, and I would have to watch it all.

'Very well,' the King said at last. 'I will write to Dr Wolff myself. But I suggest that the Countess von Strofzin leaves Ruritania as soon as possible; for the Count von Winterstadt has a suspicious mind.'


	13. ... And Wagers Everything

The wedding was a hurried, plain affair, as befitted a union with so little substance to it. But no – there was feeling on both sides; for I feel to this day a most sincere regard for my dear friend Nikolas, and a profound gratitude for the good deed he rendered to me. As for him – well, it is surely a mark of his friendship as well as his generous nature that for my sake he surrendered all hope of the happiness that the world assumes will come of marriage.

Thinking of this, I wept. My mother wept, too, and not one of my three brothers was innocent of a manly tear. I kissed them all and wept again, knowing, as they did not, that this was the last time I would see them on this earth. It was a costly gamble I had made, and still I did not know which way the dice would fall.

'Elsa,' Nikolas said at length, 'we must be on our way.'

And so, with a last embrace for all my family, we climbed into the Werdenstein carriage and set out for the Hauptbahnhof. I bribed my maid until she remembered that her grandmother was seriously ill in Zenda, and provided her with a ticket. Then Nikolas and I boarded our own train. – not, as one might have thought for the Dresden train (for we were to spend our honeymoon in Paris), but for the east, to Feuchtburg and the Hauptwald.

  
My mind became calmer as we steamed down the line I knew so well from my school days. Indeed, I laughed to myself, thinking that when I was ten or thirteen I would not have gone to such trouble for Theresa von Strofzin. Hearing that, Nikolas looked up from his newspaper and smiled.

'I'm afraid we shall have to stop at Feuchtburg,' he observed. 'We shan't get to this hospital before nightfall, and it will look deuced odd if we turn up at midnight.'

I was anxious to reach Theresa before the King changed his mind, but I saw Nikolas' point. It would be fatal to appear too anxious, and besides, we would have nowhere to go once we arrived. We spent, therefore, a chaste night at a Feuchtburg inn, and set out for the asylum in the morning.

Dr Wolff was delighted to receive us, and congratulated us most fervently on our new-found happiness. How unselfish of us, to delay our honeymoon in order to visit my poor afflicted cousin! Yes, he was happy to report that he had observed some considerable improvement.

'I am delighted to hear that,' said Nikolas, 'for we have come no little distance in order to bring the Countess Theresa back to Strelsau, before we travel on to Paris. Unfortunately, her cousins – my dear wife's brothers – have received their marching orders, as has the Countess' brother-in-law. My wife and I did not hesitate to divert our journey in this direction, but you will understand, sir, that we wish to prolong our visit here as little as possible.'

We had agreed that Nikolas would play the principal part in this little comedy, for I was not sure that I could speak to the doctor without screaming, which would help neither me nor Theresa.

'I fear that's quite impossible,' said Dr Wolff. 'I said that the Countess was improved, not that she was well. On the contrary: it will be several months before she will be in a condition to return to her everyday life.'

This was what I had feared: that the doctor also had convinced himself that Theresa was mad, and that he would insist on keeping her captive for her own good. Well, if it came to it, we would revert to our first plan, and carry her away by force.

Nikolas, however, produced the paper, heavy with seals and bearing the unmistakeable signature of the King. 'You misunderstand me, sir. It is not of the family's choosing that the Countess is to be discharged from here – though we are of course delighted. We have received direction from another source.'

Dr Wolff was dubious, but he knew that he could not quarrel with the order from the King.

'It's most irregular,' he complained. 'His Majesty, wise as he may be, is hardly a man of medical knowledge, let alone in such an advanced field as this. However...' He studied the page. 'It appears that arrangements have been made for the Countess' reception at a sanatorium on the Belgian coast. I cannot question the suitability of that establishment; indeed, I have referred patients there myself.'

'Ah, indeed,' Nikolas said blandly. 'I had not heard what would be happening after we had restored her to her parents. No doubt the sea air...'

'Quite,' the doctor agreed. 'Well, that being the case, I shall have the Countess woken immediately, and order her possessions packed.

He excused himself and left the room. I stifled a hysterical giggle, and fell to pacing about in a fever of impatience, lest my love be wrenched away from me even at this juncture.

  
I had half expected her to fall into my arms, and had prepared a touching little speech to pass off the embrace as a passionless cousinly gesture. But when she saw me she stopped on the threshold. I shall see her poor haunted face until the day I die, and it will be no more than I deserve.

'Why, Countess,' said Dr Wolff, 'don't you remember your cousin Elisabeth? This is her new husband. They have come to take you away.'

Then, only then, did she take one step into that little parlour, and seemed to swoon as she did so. I cried out; the doctor and Nikolas between them caught her as she fell.

We did not speak until we were safely in a first class compartment on the train back towards Strelsau. Then, as swiftly as I might, I explained our plan to her. 'Nikolas and I are married. We have asked for your release by way of a wedding present from his majesty. His orders cannot easily be overridden, but it is not safe for you to remain in Ruritania. Therefore, you come with us, tonight. Nikolas will leave us when we are safe across the border in Germany. In a month, perhaps less, Ruritania will hear that Elisabeth von Werdenstein, and perhaps her new husband too, have been killed in some accident on their honeymoon.'

'Then you are truly married,' she protested, and she would not let me kiss her.

'There was no other way around it,' I said.

God bless Nikolas! He saw instantly what was troubling Theresa, and how to mend matters. Speaking to me, and to me only, and yet making sure that he spoke loud enough for Theresa to hear, he said, 'Elisabeth Flavia Luise Hedwig von Werdenstein, you have pledged to me your love, your loyalty and your obedience. I command you now to go to this woman you love, to take her to safety and to protect her with all your might so long as it lies within your power. I release you from every vow that you have made to me, and I beg you to regard me no longer as your husband, but as your most devoted friend.'

Now he turned to Theresa. He beckoned her; as she approached, he gently took her hand and laid it in mine. 'Theresa...'

'Theresa Amelia Magdalena von Strofzin,' I supplied, seeing his game now.

'Theresa Amelia Magalena von Strofzin, I commend to you my wife. Such of her being as it is in my power to bestow, I bestow upon you. Truly, though, she is not mine to give you. She comes to you of her own free will. Though we break these vows a scant day after making them, we did not take them lightly. If we have sinned, it will be forgiven us, for she has loved much.'

I was hard put to it not to weep as I drew my new wedding ring from my hand and laid it in Nikolas' palm. 'Dearest Nikolas,' I said, 'as you have released me, so I release you. Go where you will, love whom you will. I renounce any claim on you that I might be considered to have. I thank you for your kindness, the unspeakable service that you have rendered to me, and the incomparable sacrifice that you have made for my sake.

He bent and kissed Theresa's hand, then turned to me and kissed my lips. It was the first time that I kissed him, and the last.

I do not think that Theresa quite believed either of us until she saw that kiss, devoid of passion yet marking the sincere regard that we had one for each other.

  
She wanted to return to Strelsau, to reassemble the remnant of the group that had been so cruelly suppressed. I begged her to abandon the idea. 'My heart, you can do nothing in Strelsau; there is nothing left with which to do it. Grant me but this: leave Ruritania, and go where you will be safe. Surely your companions had friends elsewhere?'

Her eyes flashed. ‘They will think me a coward!’

‘I wish you were,’ said I.

Nikolas, uncomfortable, cleared his throat. Elopement was one thing, but revolution was another, and he would have no hand in that, even if I was only offering tinsel revolutions to calm Theresa. Fortunately, at that point, the train lurched to a sudden halt which, I was sure, appeared on no timetable.

We abandoned our debate. Nikolas peered out of the window to see what was going on. He was just turning back to say to me, 'I can't see anything,' when the door into the corridor crashed open and a breathless voice exclaimed, 'Hands up!'

Then it burst out laughing.

Nikolas did not immediately recognise the figure that held the gun, and failed to find the weapon amusing. 'What is the meaning of this?' he barked – but he had his hands up.

So had I. 'Fräulein Hentzau. Or is it Herr, today?' I asked. For Maria was dressed now in black coat and breeches, and her hair was inexpertly cropped to short curls.

'Countess, when once I return to Strelsau. I'll thank you to help me.' She indicated that we should all three of us sit on the same bench. She lolled across the opposite one, keeping us covered with the gun. 'I'm sure you also are armed, Captain von Werdenstein. You will not be the one I shoot.'

'We aren't going to Strelsau,' I said. Next to me, Theresa was shivering.

'So much I surmised. No more does this train. I believe it isn't possible to change their course – at least, not from on board. A pity.'

'What brings you here, then?'

She laughed. 'In actual fact I was waiting for the eleven fifteen, which does go to Strelsau. However, the young woman with whom I spent last night proved to have a father, and I was obliged to bring my plans forward.'

'How did you stop the train?' I asked.

'Why, the usual way. With the signal. It's really quite simple, when one has an elementary knowledge of levers, and a good head for heights.' This with a disdainful glance at me; evidently she had not forgotten my own weakness. 'You'll see: we won't move for a while now, until the guard's run back to the signalbox to see what the matter is.'

This struck me as a dangerous sort of way to arrange one's transport, but I let it pass.

'You wanted us to help you?' Nikolas ventured, rather courteously, given the circumstances.

'Ah, yes. Rather fortunate that I ran into you. What are you all three doing out here? Congratulations, by the way.' She did not specify to whom these were addressed; I wondered how much she had divined of our scheme. 'Only a few little details. You needn't worry: I'll be leaving at the next stop. You only need to hide me until then. Have you any money on you?'

We parted with her at Sternsee, at some material loss, and considered that we had got off lightly. She agreed jovially not to mention that she had seen us, so that we would extend her the same courtesy, and, I suppose, went on her way to Strelsau.


	14. Lost and Gained

So far, we had been successful – and lucky. None of us would breathe easy until we left Ruritania behind us. There was no trouble at the frontier. We were a honeymooning couple travelling with my maid. Indeed, the guard must have been a devotee of the illustrated papers, for he recognised us and wished us well. I did my best to accept his congratulations gracefully, and not to reveal how nervous I was – though I suppose any bride might have looked so, if not for precisely the same reasons. Once clear of the frontier, Theresa and I changed clothes. She became Nikolas' sister, sent to the seaside to speed her recovery from an unspecified illness; I was her companion. At Dresden, we changed trains. The delay irked me, but we had agreed that it was dangerous to travel longer than we needed in first class. Theresa laid her head on my shoulder and slept at last. Nikolas occupied himself with a German newspaper. He travelled with us as far as Leipzig and saw us ensconced in a tavern by the name of the Boar's Head, where he engaged for us a single room.

'I cannot sleep alone,' Theresa said, trembling.

Besides, it was cheaper, and we were obliged to worry about things like that now.

There Nikolas left us, and, knowing not whether I would see him again, my tears were real. 'Take care of her,' he said, and I do not know which of us he spoke to.

The landlady kindled a hearty blaze in the fireplace, and a little boy with red hair and a nose that would, when childhood's soft lines were sharpened, perhaps be rather long and pointed, came in with a hot brick to warm the bed.

The dinner was simple but plentiful. Theresa and I ate in silence, our hearts too full of sorrow for all that had passed and fear for all that was still to come to be able to speak easily.

Afterwards, we had a bath brought up to the room for Theresa, and cans of hot water to fill it. I would have turned away to let her undress, but she let out a little cry of pain and protest. 'Don't leave me, Elsa!'

'I would not have left you,' I said, but she clung to me, and so I told her, 'I will not leave you.'

'Help me,' she said. 'I don't think I can...' And so I undid buttons and laces for her, and tested the water to make sure that it was not too hot and not too cold, and helped her into the bath, and I washed her, gentle as I could be, my heart full of a curious mixture of tenderness and vengeful anger. I wetted the sponge and drew it carefully down her thin back, puzzling at the cruel red marks that speckled her shoulders and arms.

'My love,' I said, 'what did they do to you?'

She made a wordless sound of anguish and held out her arms to me; she had, I saw now, been weeping silently all the while. Heedless of the water that dripped from her, I embraced her; she buried her face in my bosom and sobbed outright. I reached for a towel, keeping my other arm tight round her, and wrapped the two of us within it, lest she take a chill. Her skin was warm and damp beneath my fingers.

At last, her voice flat and stifled, she said, 'They did not do so very much to me. I was fortunate.'

Fortunate! 'Your arms – your back -'

'An experiment of Dr Wolff's,' she muttered, as if she recited a lesson. 'He believes that melancholic lethargy can be dispersed by stimulation of the nerves – that is, by pain. It did not make much difference to me; he found that he was obliged to repeat the treatment many times.' Still that dull tone; these words were not hers. Then, 'No – don't let me go!' - for I had loosened my hold, fearing that I was hurting her now. 'And I was fortunate.'

'Compared to whom, my God, compared to whom?'

'Compared,' she said, bitterly, 'to the patients whose cases Dr Wolff found particularly interesting.' And her whole frame shook with a great convulsive shudder, as if she did not know whether to cling tighter to me or to push me away. 'The women like us, Elsa, the women whose love is forbidden and whose lusts are unthinkable. When I saw you there in the parlour I feared they'd found you out and sent you there.'

'Oh -' I stroked her bright hair. 'They didn't know that you, too -'

'No, to my shame. At first I took no interest in who shared my confinement, and why. I lay on my bed wishing I was dead, trying to believe that I was. My comrades, my friends all killed – oh, they made sure I knew about that – and never to see you again!' She looked up at me suddenly, eyes bright. 'If there were justice in the world, Elsa, I would be dead now! No, I loved nobody there, and so I was safe.'

'Not justice, then, but perhaps mercy,' I said, clumsy with sorrow and relief.

She shook her head. 'Not mercy. Later, I talked to Petra, who had the room next to mine, and she told me why they had put her there, and what they did to her. I understood then the awful cries I heard at night, and what had happened to the broken women who passed me in the corridors. I ought to have told, that I was the same, that if they deserved -'

'But what good would it have done?' I asked, gently.

She wept silently for a moment. Then she said, 'After a while I told myself that I deserved punishment – not for who I was, or for what I believed, but for what I had done. Torture, confinement, death. I told myself that it was justified, that it was a battle, even if not one that would be called a battle, that it was kill or be killed. For I killed a man, Elsa, there in the streets of Strelsau. An honest man, I dare say, who had done me no harm. I killed him not for what he was but for what he stood for. I don't know who he was. It might have been one of your brothers for all I knew.'

'It was not,' I said.

'We ran out of ammunition long before they captured us. The last hour was blood and defiance. They wanted us alive; they wanted to make an example of us. At least, of everyone except me. They hid me away, where I could cause no embarrassment; they did not much care what became of me there. I think they would have left me to die there, perhaps fifty years hence.'

'But Dr Wolff's -' I shuddered to say it – 'interests?'

'He has other _interesting_ patients. He didn't think to inquire further than my politics. If a daughter of the house of Strofzin joins the Communist cause she must be mad, mustn't she? That was enough even for Dr Wolff.'

Though I trembled for Petra and the other women in there, I thanked God that Theresa had been spared one ordeal at least. 'What would he have done?'

She bit her lip. 'I can't talk about it. He - he made them believe there was none other like them, that they were unnatural, monstrously unique. That was why he let Petra talk to me. _Normal_ women were of great assistance to him in his work, even mad Red ones. In the end, they forgot who they were. Even Petra began to forget.'

'Forget?'

'That she'd ever loved – that she'd ever loved at all, I think. But that she had loved a woman. The world outside was a dream, and no woman could want another – or anyone. Any one so unfortunate as to break that rule – well, she would never find another soul to reciprocate. And then I heard of your wedding! I read the notice in the paper!' A low cry of anguish. 'O, Elsa, tell me you desired me, for I began to believe him myself!'

I pressed my lips to hers, perceiving for the first time that her kiss was as urgent as mine, that she, too, burned with that desire that I had thought her too unworldly to share. And, now she asked me, I found that I had not the words to confess it. 'My red rose,' I said, low and fierce. 'It was always you. We put the notice in for you.'

She nodded. 'I saw it; it kept me believing.'

'I love you,' I said.

She looked up at me, still doubting. 'And more?'

Was it not written across my face? I could feel my breath short with lust, my heart racing. 'I have wanted you since – since that night at Castle Zenda. I was ashamed,' I confessed, 'to let you see it. I could not believe you would want what I did -'

A dull little laugh. 'When will you learn that I'm no saint?'

'Never,' I said, 'but I begin to see that saints are human. Come.' I stood up, holding my hands out to her. She caught them and scrambled to her feet, sending water splashing across the hearthrug. O, she was lovely then, her eyes wide and her face glowing with reflected firelight. I kissed her over and over, and she wound her arms around my neck and returned my kisses as hard as I could give them, the water streaming down her until I too was almost soaked.

I took another towel and dried her, telling her all the while of how I wanted her, she meanwhile loosening my hair and unfastening my garments, until we both stood naked, and there was nothing left to be said.

The bed was wide and warm, and she took my hand and led me to it. I, freed at last from shame and the shackles of my own past, followed her willingly. She took me to herself with a thousand kisses and, weary and bruised as we both were, we found in that homely room a bliss that elated and fortified us. I gloried in her innocent eagerness, and my own jubilant release.

Afterwards, she wept a little, and then lay in my arms laughing, and though she had lost everything that had once been hers, and though I had left everything that had been mine, still, we had each other, and a whole world to make our own.


End file.
